


My Master, My Slave

by MissMoe



Category: Ai no Kusabi
Genre: Bad Decisions, Blow Jobs, Co-Dependency, Dom/sub Undertones, Eventual Happy Ending, First Time, Guilt, Hand Jobs, Hate to Love, M/M, Master/Pet, Obsession, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Porn with Feelings, Rough Sex, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2019-11-21 17:55:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 45,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18145505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissMoe/pseuds/MissMoe
Summary: Glimpses into the thoughts and experiences of Riki and Iason as their relationship slowly changes in unexpected ways. Who is the real master and who is the real slave?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Full disclosure: I am NO expert on Ai no Kusabi. I’ve seen the original anime from 1992 and some parts of the 2012 anime, which I found very confusing. I’ve also only read Vol. 3 of the novels by the author Rieko Yoshihara (I’ve ordered Vol. 2 but it has yet to arrive). What this means is that I have a very limited understanding of the details/characters/story arcs from this amazing novel/anime series, but I still want to explore what I see as super compelling dynamics between Iason and Riki. This fic is just me asking “what if?” and trying to fill in the gaps for myself. I have no idea how closely this is going to follow canon since I’m not clear on that myself. Please forgive me if I wander way off-canon and into what may be completely AU territory. Some of the divergence will be deliberate, but some may be out of ignorance, too. If you spot something that is so glaringly OOC that it makes no sense at all, feel free to let me know in the comments section. Feedback and constructive criticism are always welcome.

I was born into the slums of Ceres. That’s like winning a lottery where the jackpot is a gigantic pile of steaming shit, and then the universe says, “Here, have some more” while giving you the finger. People like me are called 'mongrels' by those who hold higher status, which is pretty much everybody else: those pleasure loving assholes in neighboring Midas, those Elite overlords lounging in splendor in Tanagura, that glittering city of the gods, or so I’m told. Eos Tower is barely visible from the garbage pit that is Ceres; the smog is so thick down here in the dumps, even at night when neon reigns. Fuck ‘em all, I say. They can keep their holier than thou status, their fancy clothes and their snobbish attitudes. At least us 'mongrels' are free. We live in filth and squalor and fight over scraps like rabid dogs, but we can still say we’re free. It’s easy to tell yourself lies when you have nothing in life except the stench of the air you breathe of your own volition, nothing to offer in trade besides your own body.

I didn’t always value my freedom, or even understand what it was. There was a time when all I saw was the filth and squalor and my one and only goal was to escape it. I was such an idiot. How does that saying go? You don’t appreciate what you have until it’s gone? I had a gang, Bison, and with it I had compatriots I could call my family when I had no other to speak of, and I had Guy, who loved me. I loved him, too. He wasn’t just my second-in-command in Bison, he was my pairing partner, the man who popped my cherry. I was thirteen, fresh out of Guardian, and Guy was sixteen. I gave myself to him willingly, maybe even a little too eagerly. I’d had many opportunities to lose my virginity before Guy, like with that dickhead Robby, who was always getting up in my face at that shithole of an orphanage. He was so hot and bothered for a piece of ass, my ass, but I knew I was better than trash like him. Growing up in Guardian meant you learned real fast how to defend yourself with your own fists and wits or you were made to grovel, and I didn’t grovel for anyone, especially a douche like Robby. Guy didn’t ask me to grovel. He was generous and easy going. He bought me food and drink and smokes, treated me with respect even though he was bigger and older than me. The first time he kissed me, he asked me for permission. 

“Riki,” he said, “is it okay if I kiss you?”

I laughed at him, a little drunk on the stout we were sharing. “Don’t be an idiot,” I snorted. It was all false bravado, because in the next moment my cheeks were burning something awful from my own fear and excitement. I was so relieved when he leaned in, his arms circling around my ribs, and pulled me close. The sensation of his warm lips on mine was more thrilling than I thought it would be, and then he snaked his tongue into my mouth and, holy shit, I’d never felt anything like that before. It was weird and wet and muscular and it made my cock jump in my trousers. I remember thinking, “I want him to fuck me. Am I in love?” Stupid, right?

He went real slow with me. It was my first time. Guy had already been with others and I was grateful he knew what he was doing. Well, I had nothing else to compare it to, but it felt like he knew what he was doing. He took me down to his bed in the back room next to the workshop where he kept his bike. It was more of a cot with a thin futon thrown over it than a real bed with a real mattress, but we weren’t exactly living in the lap of luxury. He kissed me a lot. Even while he undressed me, he kept kissing me. I liked it; it made me want more of him. When he rubbed and licked my nipples, I started moaning. His mouth felt so hot on my skin, and then he put his mouth on my cock and sucked me down into his throat. That’s when I really started making noises, the feeling of pleasure was so intense, way better than jacking it with my hand. I came in two seconds, my nuts exploding in their sac, it was ridiculous.

I was too young and inexperienced to be embarrassed about such lack of stamina, and Guy didn’t seem to mind at all that I had shot my load into his mouth without any warning. That was rude, even I knew that, but he just smiled at me and kissed my thighs. When he kissed my mouth I could taste myself on his tongue. It was really weird. I had never tasted myself before. I can’t say that I liked it, but Guy told me, “Hmm, Riki, you’re so good.” He caressed down my body, murmuring, “Do you want me, baby?” and then he led my hand to his erection, curling my fingers around its hard length, asking, “Do you want me inside you?” I immediately said, “Yes!” without even thinking, without knowing what to expect. Well, I mean, I knew he was going to put his cock inside me, but I didn’t know what it would feel like. Would it hurt? Everybody did it. I’d seen guys fucking each other in the dorms and hallways of Guardian all the time, and the guys bottoming had made the kinds of noises I’d already made with Guy, so it had to feel good…

He had me roll onto my stomach and open my legs. “Here,” he said, and he put a pillow under my hips. I felt kind of stupid with my ass raised in the air like that, but when he started kissing down my spine and onto both of my ass cheeks, nipping and kneading them, I forgot all about feeling stupid. I couldn’t wait for him to just shove it up in there, but he tongued me there instead! Once I got over the shock of it, I started moaning shamelessly again as he licked at my hole, my ass cheeks held apart by his thumbs on either side digging into my flesh. He was driving me insane and, trapped beneath me against the pillow, I could feel my cock hardening again. Oh god, I was going to lose my mind if he kept doing this, so I cried out, begging into the sheets, “Guy, no more. Just fuck me!” Even though I was spread out like some limp rag doll, my thighs were literally shaking, I had so much pent up energy and frustration that needed to find release.

At last, I felt him lean over and reach for something in a drawer in his night table. I heard a cap being flipped open and then his fingers at my entrance again. He rubbed something wet and slick around the rim and then pushed a finger inside me, spreading the lube deeper. I could feel the cold as more lube was squirted onto my hole and then another finger pushing inside. “Is this okay?” Guy asked.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m okay.” It didn’t hurt at all. In fact, it felt really good and that made me even more impatient for Guy to get on with it. “Just hurry up and fuck me already,” I insisted, “I’m not going to break, for crying out loud!” Ten seconds later, I had to swallow my words. As soon as I felt Guy’s cock at my entrance, I leaned back into him, pushing my hips off the pillow to urge him in faster. I felt the head slip in at last and yeah it felt fucking great. I couldn’t understand why Guy was holding himself still instead of pounding his cock into me like I’d seen others do and it was infuriating. Didn't he want me like I wanted him? I reached behind me and grabbed at his hip, pulling him close.

“Wait, Riki, don’t—”

His cock penetrated just another inch, but that extra inch was enough to make every muscle in my ass spasm in protest and I screamed out because all of a sudden everything _hurt_. “Oh, fuck fuck fuck!!!” I keened into the darkness, my eyes screwed shut and bursts of red lighting up the backs of my lids. Now I knew, too late, why Guy was holding back and taking his sweet old time. Well, only fools rush in and I was a goddamn fool!

“Just breathe, baby,” I heard Guy telling me. He folded his warm body over mine and kissed my cheek, whispered into my ear, “Just relax, Riki, you’ll be okay. It’ll feel good soon if you relax.” 

All I could do was nod and whimper like a child who’d been knocked down a few notches by his own greed and stupidity. I breathed, just like Guy told me to, and to my surprise, the sharp, stabbing pain slowly went away as my body unclenched. When he nudged his hips into mine again, it didn’t hurt. It didn’t feel good either, more like being uncomfortably full, especially when he finally sank his cock into me to the hilt, but then he started moving, pulling out and pushing in slowly, and each time he did it it felt better and better. “More,” I moaned, “faster.” Guy had me on my side at this point and, at my encouraging words, he began thrusting in a shallow, steady rhythm that had the cot creaking on its metal legs and me panting like an overheated dog in the summer sun. I can’t even describe what that first time felt like other than I was pretty much incoherent by the time I started jacking myself off as Guy rearranged my organs from the inside. I was out of my mind, completely lost in pure sensation and it was overwhelming. I came so hard I thought I would black out, it was so intense. Having Guy’s cock filling all the space inside me…I had never felt so whole. For the first time, I wasn’t alone in the world; I had Guy and his cock and his hands and his kisses, and when he came deep inside me and shouted out my name, “Riki! Riki!” the sound of it was enough to wash away all the filth of my life.

Those two years with Guy and Bison were good. Sometimes I wonder if my memory of those days is hopelessly warped when seen through the lens of time and experience, but I like to think that the happiness I felt was real and not something imagined or distorted beyond truth in retrospect. I escaped the slums of Ceres, and in doing so I lost it all: Bison, Guy, my freedom. I lost myself, too: who and what I am, who and what I was, all of me belongs to someone else now, to my Master whom I fear and loathe and love, my Master who chains my heart and my soul, my Master who fills me with shame as much as he fills me with his cock. My Master, Iason Mink.

________

These two fan-made AMVs inspired me to dip my toes into this fandom:

[AnK, Dark Horse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkjYnc3RvYA)

[AnK, No Light](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC2xvgP8eFo)

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure how old Guy is in the novels, but in this fic I'm making him three years older than Riki.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve now read Vol. 2 and Vol. 3 of the novels by Yoshihara, and that will likely remain the extent of my reading of the source material since the other volumes are too expensive for me to acquire even in used condition. That being the case, these early chapters of this fic will be fairly canon compliant, but later chapters will probably meander off the reservation.

On the streets I’m known as “Riki the Dark” or “Riki the Black.” Some people think I earned that moniker from my days working as a courier in the Black Market, others say it’s because of my coloring. The black of my hair and eyes is rare in Ceres, or maybe people with naturally dark hair and eyes dye them a different color to disguise the fact. It’s an undesirable trait, just my lousy luck. In Midas and Tanagura, the lighter your hair and eyes, the higher up you sit on the social totem pole. I guess that means I’m the lowest of the low. I don’t care. I don’t mind being rare, even if it’s a bad thing. I’m a black-haired, black-eyed mongrel and I’m proud of it. I like rubbing elbows with the rich citizens of Midas—me with my dark mongrel coloring that just screams, “Despise me because I’m so fucking low class!”—and seeing the disdain rise up into their faces. It gives me so much satisfaction, so much _entertainment_. They’re usually too busy being offended by my presence to notice that I’m picking their pockets as I pass by on the sidewalk. It’s hilarious. Petty thievery not only provides me with a means of living, it’s good exercise and I get to window shop at the same time. I can look at all the shiny shit I’ll never be able to afford, like a new bike. Whatever. I can steal what I can’t buy.

It was on one such night in downtown Midas, my mind pre-occupied with fantasies of finding a way out of the cesspool of Ceres, that I ran into _him_. I hated him right away and for so many reasons. He had caught me pickpocketing and then decided I wasn’t even worth turning in to the police, his cold blue eyes told me how little he thought of me; I was a cockroach he wouldn’t even deign to crush under his feet lest I dirty his fancy-schmancy shoes with my spilled guts. That he stood over two meters tall made me look twice, but his appearance was even more startling than his height. I had never actually seen a Blondie in person. Tanagura’s highest ranking Elites were almost mythical creatures to us mongrels, rumored to be created by Jupiter herself and not even human like the babies incubated in artificial wombs. An Elite, much less a Blondie class, would never step foot in the slums of Ceres, and this one with his hand gripping my arm and almost crushing it like a toothpick was something I could have never imagined in my wildest dreams. His skin was eerily pale against my own ruddy complexion, and his hair was long, longer even than Guy’s and, like the name that distinguished them, as blond as could be. How could a thing so perfect and beautiful exist in the same flawed and ugly world as myself? My pride, though, my pride couldn’t stand to be tossed aside like garbage by this thing. I had grown up in Guardian, smaller than many of the other orphans and therefore a target for abuse, and I had learned to stand up for myself. Oftentimes it meant using my fists, but as many other times it meant lashing out with words. I knew I stood no chance of dominating this creature physically, so I ran my mouth. I was good at that. Very good.

“Oi, asshole, th' fuck are you doing? Ain't you gonna turn me in?” I grabbed at his arm and he swatted me off like a mosquito. I paid no mind to the fact that people were staring at me as if I had grown three heads. Let them gawk, I wasn't going to back down.

In a silky soft voice, he told me, “Go back to Ceres, mongrel.”

Of course, he turned his back on me again, and again I grabbed his arm and this time I held on with all my might, hissing, “I don’t owe debts to anyone, least of all a Blondie.” My anger made me brave, like stupid brave, because the next thing I did was drag us both to a love hotel hidden within the Minos Bar, an open secret known to all the locals, in order to offer my body in payment. Why he didn’t hand me over to the Darkmen to be beaten to a pulp was anyone’s guess, but there was no way in hell I’d let him hold that over my head. Once we got to the place, though, he didn’t seem interested in fucking me in the ass. He was more interested in fucking my ears with his words, hurling insults at me like a monkey in a cage slinging shit. Only, he wasn’t a monkey in a cage…that was more me, I guess, and all I could do was toss the shit right back in his ridiculously dazzling face.

“Do you want to do this or not? I ain’t got all night.” I sat on the edge of the bed with my chin stuck out. I can only imagine how cocky I looked. He sat across from me on a chair with his legs casually crossed, assessing me like I was bacteria under a microscope.

“Is this how you assuage your shredded ego? You throw your slutty self at a stranger who is clearly way out of your league?” 

My jaw dropped. If another gangbanger in Ceres had said that to me, there’d be fur flying in half a second, but I had an inkling through all the red I was seeing that getting in a brawl with this freak was a bad idea. This whole encounter was a bad idea, but I couldn’t just walk out the door without humiliating myself further. The problem was, staying and finishing what I started was probably going to be just as bad as leaving.

“I already told you, dumbass, I ain’t got no money, so you get to have your pervy way with me. I pay my debt and we’re done, got it?”

The huge man sniffed the air. “What makes you think your scrawny body could satisfy any debt?”

I jumped off the bed and shook my fists at him. I wanted to punch him in the face _so bad_ but I punched the air instead, imagining how good it would feel to knock that smug look right off him and into space. “Yes or no, motherfucker?! Do you wanna fuck me or not?” I could feel the steam shooting out of my ears.

Another sniff and then a bored sigh issued from him. He waved a gloved finger at me. “Take your clothes off and stand against the wall.”

 _Finally!_ I let out a loud groan through clenched teeth and stripped naked as fast as I could. “Let’s just get this over with,” I spat at him. I stalked over to the wall and faced it, putting my hands on the peeling paint to brace myself. Even though the room was cool, I broke out in a sweat anyway; my nerves were frayed and I just wanted to go back to the garage and crawl into bed next to Guy and feel his arms around me, have him kiss me and tell me everything was going to be alright. Minutes seemed to tick by before I heard the Blondie get up from the chair and approach me. Then, he was right there, standing so close behind me I could smell him for the first time. He smelled like no other man I’d ever met. I couldn’t even put into words what he smelled like. It was probably some super expensive cologne or something, but all I could think in that moment was, “This must be what it’s like to be clean.” Then, for some crazy reason, I thought, “I wonder what he tastes like? Does he taste like Guy?”

“Turn around,” I heard him say.

I turned around and there he stood towering over me, still fully clothed. I had to crane my neck up and even then I was barely able to meet his cold stare. “Aaa-aren’t you going to take your clothes off?” I muttered into his chest. That’s when I noticed what he was wearing. I was used to watching the citizens and tourists of Midas strolling around in their finery, but this man’s attire was of a material and quality I’d never seen before, and as he wedged a firm leg between my thighs, I wondered what was underneath it all. I had never had sex with anyone but Guy, so my curiosity began pumping through me, along with the adrenalin and the fear and the blood rushing to my cock. _Fuck_.

The man merely grabbed my wrists and pinned my arms over my head with one huge hand. He lowered his head and murmured right into my face in the softest, deepest purr, “Why would I need to undress in order to discipline a filthy mongrel whore such as yourself?” If it weren’t for the actual meaning of the words he was saying, I’d think he was reciting poetry, his voice was like the sweetest caress, and when he ordered, “Now moan for me like the dirty slut that you are,” and began rubbing my nipple between the thumb and forefinger of his other gloved hand, I found myself obeying his command, the noises tumbling unobstructed from my quivering lips as I rode his knee.

“Ah! Ah! Ah!” I heard those sounds ringing in my ears and couldn’t believe they were coming from me even as I made them, even as I panted and squirmed in his tight grasp. He moved his fingers to my other nipple and tortured that one into a hard nub as well before bending lower and tracing the tip of his tongue along the shell of my ear, then sucking the entire lobe into his mouth. I was startled by the heat of that mouth, the hot wetness, and then the heat of his breath as he licked down my neck, sucking and nipping as I cried out despite myself. I had no idea what had come over me. Sex was always good with Guy; he always got me off, always left me satisfied, but this…this insufferable bastard was using only his mouth and fingers on my neck and nipples and I was on the edge of ecstasy. Why? How? I was being violated and shamed and I knew it and yet…yet…my body was betraying me at every turn. One more pinch of my nipple and I came, wetting my stomach and probably staining the Blondie’s exquisite clothing. I thought that would be it—I had paid my debt and could go now, slink off with my tail between my legs—but he wasn’t done playing with me apparently.

“Tsk. Coming that fast is nothing to be proud of,” he chided.

My face was aflame with embarrassment and wounded pride. “Let me go,” I insisted, struggling to free my arms but his knee was still lodged between my legs and I could gain no purchase, my toes barely touched the floor.

He only gripped me tighter and said, “What? You expect me to let you go after such a pathetic performance?” His other hand carded through my hair and tugged painfully at the strands, jerking my head up to face him. “Have you forgotten already? You’re the one who wanted to buy my silence. Is it wrong for me to expect proper payment?”

That’s when I got my first sickening glimpse into the bottomless pit of this man’s cruelty. He swiped two gloved fingers across my stomach, smearing my cooling spunk onto those long digits before reaching between my thighs and unceremoniously shoving them into my ass. He was not the least bit gentle, didn’t care at all that I was still winding down from an orgasm and was overly-sensitive to touch. No, he began probing right away, twisting and turning his hand inside me with rough movements.

I screamed out, not caring that I must have sounded like I was begging, “Stop it! I’m not a toy! Gyaaah! Enough already!” He let my arms go so he could grasp my hip and hold me still and I fell to clawing at his chest and shoulders, the pain and pleasure warring inside me, raging like a hurricane in my groin, in my head, in my heart which threated to beat right out of my ribcage. He was jabbing at my prostate mercilessly, stopping whenever I began clenching down, leading me to the precipice but not letting me take that final leap. It was torture. I heard myself begging some more, “Let me come…ggghh…please…let me come!!!” I begged until I was crying hot tears of shame, over and over I begged for mercy, begged until snot was running down my chin and my voice was ragged and hoarse and then, finally, when he had deemed that I was punished sufficiently for his satisfaction, when he had torn my pride to smithereens, he let me come, pressing firmly against what he called my “bud of pleasure” which he had so expertly abused.

Then his fingers were gone, his bruising hands were gone and I collapsed onto the floor, gulping in shallow breaths while my body shook and shivered. I was so wrung out in every way, I couldn’t even cry anymore. I watched him remove his gloves and throw them into the trash can; then he tossed what looked like a gold coin onto the bed, saying, “Here’s your change. For the hush money.” He walked out the door without even looking back at me, like I didn’t even exist.

After all that, I didn’t even exist.

________

A million thanks to thesensualaristocrat for creating a beautiful piece of fan art for this chapter: [Riki x Iason](https://twitter.com/sensual_prince/)

Since this gorgeous illustration is NSFW, you'll have to click on "view" to see it. 

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to SakinaRiver for giving me access to all 8 volumes of the novel by Rieko Yoshihara. After binge-reading for the past week or so, I am now caught up. Hurray! Or, perhaps, boo-hoo, because the ending left me more depressed than ever. Well, in the wise words of the TV ad: don’t be sad, get Glad! Better yet, there’s that old saying: when life hands you lemons, make some lemonade.
> 
> This chapter is me making lemonade out of our fav lemon-haired deviant, Iason Mink. In the anime and the novel, we’re not given much insight into his thought process and motivations. He is portrayed as cool and calculating—unlike Riki, who is redhot and reactionary—so in this fic I want to let Iason run a little wild in his head and have the reader be privy to this other, more unrestrained side of him. And Raoul…I’m just going to have fun with him.
> 
> Let me know what you think, good or bad. I really appreciate any opinions you are willing to share.

He was known as “Riki the Black” on the streets of Ceres, or so I was told by Katze, my too-clever-for-his-own-good ex-Furniture (by Jupiter! I have the shittiest luck with Furniture), but to me he was always “Riki the Mouth.” The foul language that spewed incessantly from that mongrel’s piehole like sewage from an open pipe could strip paint from a wall.

I liked it. A lot.

In fact, his brazen potty mouth was one of his many distinguishing charms that took me by surprise and fascinated me to no end…but I’m getting ahead of myself. Allow me to go back to the beginning.

Hmm…ah, yes… 

I was bored out of my titanium skull that night. Raoul had asked me to accompany him to Midas for some business with the Pet auctioneers in Mistral Park, business I found tiresome beyond belief. As a scientist bent on breeding the perfect Pet through gene manipulation, Raoul could literally talk my ear off about chromosomes and DNA and stem cells and whatnot, none of which interested me. Watching dust collect was more exciting than owning Pets as far as I was concerned, though I had always dutifully fulfilled my obligation as an Elite to purchase and train the best that the Academy’s Scientific Center had to offer. If I didn’t participate in Pet ownership, I’d have to face a slap on the wrist from Jupiter and, even worse, the sincere harping of Raoul, who’d been on my case ever since he’d brought Mimea into his household. She was his newest triumph of genetic tinkering and his star Pet trainee, and he was eager to breed her with another pureblood Pet, one he hoped would be owned by _moi_. 

 _Mais pourquoi?_ you ask.

We Elites are sterile. I suspect in some twisted way, Raoul harbored the desire to have “children” with me (gulp) and mating his Pet with one of mine was the closest thing to achieving such a ridiculous goal. The problem was: I had sold off my last Pet months ago and was dragging my feet in finding a replacement. Truth be told, the mere sight of one of those idiot sex dolls made my artificial skin crawl with irritation. They were like a bad case of eczema on my engineered eyeballs, those brainless Pets. Furniture—Katze’s blatant violation of rules notwithstanding—are _useful_ at least. They cook, they clean, they make the bed each morning. Pets, on the other hand, are only valuable as status symbols and for voyeuristic entertainment if you’re into that kind of kinky shit. I, for one, have yet to pop a boner while watching Pets copulate.

“It’ll be the cream of the crop offered at this next auction,” Raoul told me as we walked down the main thoroughfare in downtown Midas. Mistral Park was awash in neon and mobbed with garishly dressed tourists and denizens alike. We ambled down the center of the wide boulevard, the crowds parting before us like waves at the prow of a ship. Raoul continued chattering, using that know-it-all tone that I’ve always found so endearingly laughable. “Get yourself a new Pet to your liking. You’ve been without one for too long. People are starting to _talk_ , as if you’re some sort of common _cheapskate_. Now, now, I know you’re not _that_. You may be a complete weirdo, but you’re not _cheap_. I can help you select one with the right _temperament_. We all know how much trouble you have in judging _character_.” Raoul paused to shoot me a collegial smirk—he and everyone else in Eos Tower knew about what had happened with Katze—before prattling on, “I’ll make sure your next Pet is the most _docile_ in nature.”

Oh, Raoul…always offering me white chocolate when I prefer dark. So clueless.

Elites such as Raoul and myself have highly tuned senses, not to mention extraordinary strength, stamina, and intelligence. Fortunately, for the sake of my friendship with Raoul in particular and my sanity in general, I had long-ago perfected the very male ability, might I even say _talent_ , for selective hearing; otherwise, I might have strangled Raoul right there on the street. Don’t misunderstand. Raoul is my brother, my fellow Blondie, and is as decent and law-abiding as any of my other Elite peers. Raoul does everything by the book and, though his strict adherence to rules drives me up the wall, I have the utmost respect for him and his opinions. By Jupiter! does he have opinions…a plethora of opinions…

That night, though, I was bored and irritated by all his nagging about acquiring a new Pet. It was true. I hadn’t kept a Pet in a while, nor did I want to saddle myself with another. The ones I had purchased before were sufficiently well-made and appropriately dim-witted and, of course, they had been Academy-bred and thus came with all the right pedigree and papers proving said pedigree. But every time I looked at them I wanted to slit my wrists, not that that would have done any good. Elites are pretty much indestructible compared to the weaklings comprising the human race. Still, Raoul was right in urging me to buy a Pet at this next auction. I had an image to maintain, a reputation. I was Jupiter’s most beloved creation, accorded the rare privilege to speak directly to her, and I knew I must not tarnish that reputation. That meant resigning myself to bringing yet another new Pet into my household.

When I first saw him…well, I didn’t really see him at all. He didn’t register as Pet material; far from it. What I saw was a flash of black hair, a slender, still-adolescent body clad in shoddy black attire, and a small hand reaching out towards the open coat of an unsuspecting tourist. _Zero points for style_ , I muttered under my breath. It was easy enough to grasp that skinny wrist and stop him in his tracks. The temptation to fling him straight up into the air and then perhaps slam him onto the concrete of the sidewalk was strong, but a glimpse of his startled expression and then the cheeky arrogance in his obsidian eyes made me reconsider for a split second.

Raoul was all over the scoundrel, grabbing at his earlobe and declaring, “He has no PAM. Filthy mongrel.”

Mongrel, eh? “You go on ahead,” I told Raoul. I don’t know why I said it; I had no idea what I wanted to do with this cur, but a strange voice inside me made me say, “I’ll take care of this.” Indeed. I could see the hesitation in Raoul, but he relented when I easily tossed the mongrel onto his ass. That seemed to placate my fellow Elite.

“Don’t go picking up any odd scrap off the street,” Raoul admonished before he walked onward.

A second and closer look at the little thief proved unimpressive. He was small, still slouching towards adulthood, although the hardened look in his eyes was old beyond his sharp-fanged youth. “Go back to Ceres,” I told him, and then I turned to catch up with Raoul, who was practically mowing down the humans with his long strides. Raoul cared little for humans beyond their use as test subjects in his lab. Imagine my surprise when the stray mutt latched onto my arm and proceeded to lecture me, the great Iason Mink, on the importance of paying off debts. Clearly, he was out of his mind, probably tripping on that cheap stout favored by the slum trash of Ceres, but what left me rather stunned was his filthy speech. It seemed as if he were speaking a foreign language, the coarseness of it was unknown to my ears.

“I ain’t got no fucking fancy-ass aerocar, so we’ll have to walk,” I heard him say.

Even though Ceres—Midas’ toilet for all intents and purposes—did not appear on any official maps, it was common knowledge that all children born into the slums were educated at Guardian between the ages of six and twelve. This boy must have 'graduated' from Guardian and I could only wonder what he had been taught during his years there. Certainly not proper Amoïese. All of Eos’ Furniture was culled from Guardian, selected from the cohort of thirteen-year-olds who would be spared the slum life, and they were all appropriately demure in their speech. So, was this just an act put on by this black-haired mongrel to offend me? Having never encountered such an anomaly—such an ill-mannered, ill-spoken piece of trash with an apparent death wish—my curiosity was piqued.

And so I followed him to a love hotel. Yes. A decidedly seedy love hotel fronted by an equally seedy bar. Another first for me. This night was proving to be less and less boring. As I breathed in the dank air of the private room—the olfactory sensory neurons in my organic brain recoiling at the overwhelming odor of stale sweat, piss and cum lingering like a heady miasma of gross humanity—I couldn’t help but imagine Raoul’s look of horror should he ever discover what I was doing. It somehow made it all the more satisfying, amusing, enjoyable. Naughty. Yes, that was it: naughty. My life in Tanagura, within the antiseptic confines of Eos Tower, left little room for naughtiness. As Elites, sexual desires were to be sated through vicarious means, mainly through the observation of Pets humping at mating parties or sex soirees. Of course, that didn’t stop Elites from cavorting with each other; it wasn’t overtly sanctioned by Jupiter, but as long as sexual dalliances remained among Elites and not between Elites and humans, she looked the other way. Even Raoul, with his obsession with Pets, would never think of touching a Pet in an amorous way. That would be the ultimate debasement for an Elite.

To lowly mortal humans, the immortal Elites are seen as coolly rational and indifferent to feelings, but this could not be further from the truth. Our artificial engineered bodies still house a very human brain, a brain greatly enhanced with nano technology, but human nevertheless and thus susceptible to all the emotions felt by a human: love, hate, jealousy, sadness, compassion, rage. Most Elites, however, pride themselves on keeping a tight rein on such human tendencies, tendencies that are viewed as weaknesses and no Elite would ever knowingly choose to be weak. No, dominance and control lie at the core of an Elite’s sense of self, and it was a demonstration of this dominance and control that this mongrel boy was crying out for in that crummy room in the love hotel. Not that he knew it, but a human, especially one as feral as this black-haired slumdog, needed to be put in its place in order for it to know its purpose in life.

That night, I decided to show that dog who its master was.

It was almost too easy. He wasn’t even a trained Pet with solid imprinting, but the way his body responded to my touch, to my voice even, was so unexpected. One would think he was made for me, crafted like a fine instrument to be played by my hands alone, and Holy Fucking Jupiter did I play him! He was so receptive, his nipples and cock standing rigidly at attention from the barest of caresses, his body thrumming with excitement and breath stuttering in his lungs, and all the while his vulgar protests tumbled from his quivering lips like a waterfall of midnight curses. I was a musician pounding at the keys of a piano, and the notes still sounded like the most beautiful melody.

I left the mongrel an Aurora coin as a private joke. Inside, I was laughing, elated with what I had done. It had been so dirty, so fun!, fingering him the way I did, making him cum twice and leaving him a naked disheveled puddle on the floor while I had remained fully clothed and sheathed in dignity. I made it a point to toss my soiled gloves in the garbage can in front of his face. It wasn’t until I was back out on the street that I regretted not keeping the gloves. Yes, they were soiled, but they were soiled with _his_ disgusting mongrel juices...and suddenly, I was overcome with a sensation of hunger. Little did I know what it would take to fill that void.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now that I’m up to the third chapter, I’m beginning to get a feel for this story. 
> 
> That said, I never work with any preconceived notion of a plot because my brain is a black hole and I can’t write a plot to save my life, so my fics tend to take shape as I go along and what happens is all as much of a mystery to me as it is to the reader. I guess that’s my version of caveat emptor. You have been warned.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh, this chapter…I guess I wandered along the edges of the canon reservation and then kept walking right off the cliff.

Perhaps if Raoul hadn’t picked my brains like a vulture on carrion the next evening, I would have simply forgotten about the whole incident. But no, Raoul being Raoul, he had to know _everything_.

“Where in Jupiter’s name did you run off to last night? I waited for an _hour_ before I finally ordered dinner. I was _starving_ by then!” Raoul took a sip of his wine as we sat on the sofa in his living room. He was still nursing the pain of being stood up at the très chic restaurant in Flare after our meeting in Mistral Park the evening before. “You know how I get the shakes if my blood sugar dips too low."

“I _am_ sorry,” I replied, hiding a smirk behind my own glass of wine. “I got distracted by something I saw in a shop window…a jacket in gold and violet brocade.” Jupiter created us Elites to be perfect, but that didn’t mean we weren’t capable of telling the occasional lie. Besides, I was only trying to spare Raoul’s feelings, so I felt more than justified in making shit up. And maybe I didn’t want him to know I had illicitly toyed with a mongrel.

“You?” Raoul countered with disbelief. “Window shopping? Since when do you give a rat’s ass about _fashion_? You’re still wearing the same boots from five years ago!”

“I was only thinking of you, Raoul. That jacket would look smashing on you, what with the gold and the violet, those _are_ your colors after all and…well…there’s nothing wrong with indulging a friend once in a while, is there?” Ah, that did the trick. The sparkly eyes Raoul cast in my direction told me that all was forgiven.

“You were thinking of _me_?” A smile split Raoul’s handsome face from ear to ear as he set about refilling both of our glasses with giddy enthusiasm. “You…you didn’t spend too much, did you?”

Oh, fucking hell. Now I’d have to find a gaudy jacket in gold and violet brocade…must put Daryl to the task ASAP. I covered my lie with another lie because that’s just how lies work: once you start, it never stops. With a nonchalant wave of my silk gloved hand in the air—as if my cares were as easy to brush aside as imaginary cobwebs—I continued fibbing, “Money is no issue and I know how much you pride yourself on good taste and elegance in your wardrobe. Orphe is going to be _so_ jealous.”

“Oh, Iason,” sighed Raoul, “you are the very _best_ Blondie in all of Tanagura.” He sipped his wine, lost in contentment for a few blissful moments before he circled back to his original point. “But surely it didn’t take _all night_ to buy a jacket. I was at that restaurant for _three hours_ and you never showed up. I had to sup all by my gorgeous lonely self!” 

“Ah, well…” I chuckled apologetically, scrambling to think of a plausible excuse, “…you know how crowded it was when—” 

Raoul bolted upright on the sofa if that were even possible, his posture was always flawless. I could literally see a light bulb going on over his head. “It wasn’t that unwashed _mongrel_ , was it? Was he stalking you? Did he attack you?”

“Why would you ever think…no, of course not! Don’t be ridiculous.” As brilliant as Raoul was, I couldn’t believe he was actually homing in on the truth, even if he was coming at it ass backwards.

“Those slumdogs with their grubby paws need to be put down. You should have thrown that one to the Darkmen.”

“Hmmm…”

“Why you show mercy is beyond me.”

“Are you saying I’ve become soft in my old age?”

The heat of Raoul’s gaze raking up and down my body was matched by the lust in his deep voice. “Iason, my brother, there is nothing _soft_ about you.”

***

It was in speaking with Daryl after returning to my rooms in Eos Tower that the germ of a plan took root in my mind. Daryl looked nothing like my ex-Furniture Katze—having silvery-blond hair to Katze’s auburn red—but like Katze he was very bright and conscientious about his duties and didn’t even bat an eyelash when I told him I needed to purchase a jacket in gold and violet brocade, the more garish the better. 

“It’s for Raoul,” I explained.

The explanation was unnecessary since Daryl was obedient in fulfilling all my requests, but I felt I needed to say it for the sake of my own self-respect. Raoul was the only scientist I knew who enjoyed swanning about in haute couture 24/7. As Blondies, we wear a standard uniform when performing our daily tasks, a uniform that is, at its foundation, utilitarian and refined in its simplicity and quality of material. It is left to individual taste to “dress it up” as one sees fit. I prefer my outer robes and overcoats to be in pearl whites or dove greys, shades that are subtle and subdued, but Raoul doesn’t seem to know the meaning of too flashy. Still, I adore him all the same.

By the time we had polished off two bottles of wine, Raoul was in my lap with his tongue down my throat. Our bodies may be engineered, but our nervous system is complex—more complex than in humans—and is highly responsive to stimuli, be it taste, touch, smell, through chemicals that are inhaled, injected, or ingested, such as wine for instance, which acts as an aphrodisiac and mood enhancer. We can feel what amounts to pleasure, although it resides more in our organic brains than in our artificial skin and muscles. Kissing is certainly enjoyable and something Raoul can’t refrain from indulging in when he’s got a bellyful of wine, and an activity I’m more than happy to engage in if it means I won’t have to reveal what I did last night.

“Hmm…” he moaned, taking my hand and leading it to his crotch.

I could feel he was erect beneath his robes. “My, my, what a hungry slut you are tonight,” I teased. Raoul is a big man and he acts like Mr. Serious when he’s with the other Blondies, but when he’s alone with me he turns into a wanton marshmallow. I gave his right nipple a playful pinch while I freed his cock and began stroking with my other hand. That is how it normally was between us: Raoul squirming in my lap while I got him off. Out of the thirteen Blondies who are given residence in Eos Tower, I preferred Raoul’s company the most. Yes, he could be a royal pain in the ass with his judgmental nagging, but he always meant well and he was such a glutton for my affection that I could not help but play the willing partner. 

I jacked him off in no time and was ready to take my leave when he stopped me from getting up from the sofa. 

“No. Wait.” Raoul was still a little breathless from his orgasm and he had a light sheen of sweat across his brow. He’s really quite adorable that way. He lowered himself to his knees on the floor, nudging my legs apart with his elbows while he searched under my robes for my cock. I could tell he was disappointed that I was only sporting a slight chub. The truth is, as much as I enjoy making and seeing Raoul cum for me, I feel very little desire of my own. I’ve always been this way. My peers attend the Pet sex soirees on a regular basis, but I’ve never been interested in such things. I find them to be boring, not stimulating, and no matter how my fellow Blondies criticize me for my lack of participation, I really don’t give a flying fuck.

Raoul, though, was intent on blowing me that night, so I let him.

“Oh, go on then, brother.” I smiled down at him and carded my fingers through his luxuriant blond hair. It has a slight wave to it, unlike my own very straight hair, and I think it’s glorious. “Have your fun.” He put me in his mouth, his green eyes locked onto my blue ones, and, yes, it was more than a little arousing. He bobbed his head slowly, my cock filling in his mouth more and more, lengthening and thickening until he was choking himself on me. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the back of the sofa, listening to the obscene gagging and slurping noises as I let my mind go blank, concentrating only on the sensation of heat and wetness as Raoul expertly fellated me. I exhaled a soft moan as Raoul began stroking up and down my shaft, his tongue curling around the crown and laving at the slit, and suddenly I saw a pair of obsidian eyes, a shock of ebony hair, a small body shuddering beneath my touch. “Holy Jupiter…”

I heard Raoul make a satisfied grunt between my legs and I tightened my grip in his hair, pulling and twisting my fingers in his silky tresses as he did the same to my cock, but in my head all I could hear was the sound of that mongrel’s whimpers and curses as I took him apart, piece by filthy piece. I could smell him, too, his musky scent, a scent that screamed with pure testosterone and fury. I had never smelled such sweet perfume. It was intoxicating, and I didn’t even know it until…

I came hard and fast and it took me and Raoul equally by surprise.

We both tidied up in silence. Raoul’s throat was too abused for speech and I…I don’t know what I was. Confused? Fuck drunk? If only Raoul hadn’t given me the third degree about last night, this would have never happened. I wouldn’t have thought of _that_ while getting my dick sucked. I returned to my residence on the floor above, gave Daryl my order to find and purchase a jacket that fit my vague description, and then retired to my bed after a quick shower. I was confident that, by mid-morning, Daryl would have done a thorough search and found several hideous jackets for me to choose from; he was a fine piece of Furniture, that Daryl. His competence despite his youth made me think of Katze, another fine piece of Furniture but one I was forced to part with due to the crime he had committed. He had hacked into the Eos database somehow and downloaded secrets not fit for his eyes. I was supposed to “dispose” of him, but he was too bright and talented—imagine! A Furniture clever enough to hack into Eos’s database!—and so I had garnered all my wiles to convince Jupiter to allow me to employ him in a different capacity. I sent Katze back down to the trash heap of humanity, where he works as my agent and liaison in the Black Market. Katze came from Ceres—having been recruited from Guardian freshly castrated at thirteen years of age—and after being thrown back into the muck and mire, he knew all there was to know about its slumdogs. There was one in particular that had mysteriously gotten into my head and under my skin. It was a mongrel with dark hair and dark eyes and a mouth spewing garbage, and that night I decided that I wanted to see that dog pant and drool for me once again. I wanted to hear him _howl_ for me like he did that night.

I fell asleep and dreamed of flames licking and burning my skin, I dreamed of tears shed with the most wrenching pain, and I dreamed of happiness, of joy, of something I had yet to experience.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really don’t know what happened here. This was NOT what I expected to write. Hope I didn’t offend anyone.


	5. Chapter 5

I first saw Riki in Guardian’s outdoor 'playground,' a square courtyard of broken concrete bordered by thorny weeds where the Ceres kids in foster care took in the pungent 'fresh air' in groups divided by age. He was in with the six-year-old boys and I was with my cohort of nine-year-olds. All the girls, a dozen at the most, were kept inside in a separate wing where they had their own enclosed arboretum with air filtered free of toxins. They were the _real_ hot house flowers being grown in Guardian’s greenhouse, too delicate to be exposed to the foul stench outside or to us rowdy dumbass boys. We saw the girls only at mealtimes, when they were escorted along the far side of the cafeteria as we gaped and gawked at them. Even as kids, we knew that girls were as rare and valuable as diamonds; so few of them were born naturally. Boys were just worthless lumps of coal and there were a fuck ton of us. 

The girls would sit and eat in a small room guarded by the Mothers and Sisters while us boys would crane our necks in the communal dining area to get a glimpse of them. We’d make rude gestures in the hopes of drawing their attention, talk real loud and cocky because we were boys and capable only of stupid shit like that. Still, we got to see the girls with their long hair braided into pigtails or tied back in a ponytail or put up in a bun. Aside from the old and wrinkled Mothers and Sisters who oversaw the daily workings of the orphanage, boys in Guardian were never given the chance to speak to a girl, much less touch a girl’s hair. I could only wonder about them, these strange creatures who could have babies and pissed sitting down rather than standing up; did girls ever even take a dump?

As much as I and the other boys were curious about the girls, I was even more curious about Riki.

I noticed him for several reasons: he was the only one who had jet-black hair and eyes, and that day he stood off in a corner of the playground all by himself wearing a fierce scowl on his face, kicking at the weeds and acting like he had a gigantic chip on his skinny shoulders. None of the other boys went near him, his aura was so dark. I thought he was really weird and it made me feel sorry for him. 

“That kid is going to get his ass handed to him,” I said to my block mate Sid, “he is _so_ asking for it.”

Sure enough, ten minutes before recess ended on the first day that I saw him, one of the older boys threw a rock at him. It wasn’t a huge rock and it only thudded at Riki’s feet, but his response was to go full-on berserk. He made a beeline for the rock-thrower, his hands balled into fists, his little white teeth bared as he flung himself at the larger boy, skinny arms flailing wildly. I swear, he was foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. He must have been half a head shorter than the other boy, but that didn’t stop him from launching himself like a rocket into the eight-year-old who picked the wrong sapling to piss on. I was impressed. Yeah, Riki got a split lip and a bloody nose that day, but the next day, no one threw any rocks at him.

I was nine and he was six, and I knew I loved him from that moment on.

What would a nine-year-old snot-nosed kid know about love? I can’t really say. I can’t put my finger on it, but I knew I wanted to know him, get close to him, put my hands on him. At night in my bed, I thought about him before I fell asleep. I didn’t want to sleep at all; I only wanted to think about him. _Riki_. That was his name. I found out by asking one of his block mates, a boy named Haruka. After that, I saved a portion of my lunch—a cookie or a piece of fruit, something _sweet_ —to give to him each day.

“Here,” I’d say. “You look like you could use a little extra.”

At first he wouldn’t say anything back to me, not even a simple “thanks.” He’d just stare at me with those pitch-black eyes and purse his lips as he accepted my offering. After the fifth time, he finally asked, “Why are you being so nice to me?”

“I dunno,” I shrugged, trying to look as cool as a nine-year-old could, which wasn’t cool at all. “I like salty things and…I figure I shouldn’t let food go to waste.”

I don’t think I fooled anyone with that lame ass excuse, least of all Riki, but the truth that was as plain as the nose on my face was that I liked him more than I could even understand. I liked that he was wary and prickly, that he wasn’t afraid of the bigger boys, which was pretty much everyone. He was small and thin and…it made me want to protect him. I was tall and lanky for my age, what the Mothers and Sisters called an 'early bloomer.' The other boys liked me because I was outgoing, cheerful. That all came naturally to me. It took no _effort_ to be easy to get along with, but I could tell that Riki wanted to be his own person, someone who answered to nobody. Why was he so far ahead of us, I wondered with no little awe, that he could stand on his own two feet already and walk his own path? 

Bribing Riki with food worked, because he warmed up to me afterwards. He was so skinny and he liked sweet things and nothing made me happier than to see him wolfing down the piece of cake I had saved him. When I started sneaking into his dormitory at night, he didn’t push me away. He would giggle instead, and then lift the thin blanket and I would snuggle in beside him and hold him to my chest. We were just boys, but I loved him, and holding his small, shivering body to me until he relaxed into sleep was better than anything I could imagine. I would kiss him then, when he was asleep, an innocent kiss to his hair and his cheek and whisper, “Riki, I love you. I’ll never leave you. We’ll always be together.”

I knew he had admirers. Even though he was young and scrawny, he had such strange charisma. He was the only boy at Guardian who had such dark hair and eyes and, yeah, that set him apart for sure, but it was more than that. Riki had a fire behind those eyes, a fire that burned and scorched and raged and everyone who saw those eyes thought twice before getting on his bad side after that fight in the playground. With me, though, he was happy, welcoming, unguarded, and after three years of sneaking into his bed at night, I knew I would wait for him. No matter what, I would wait for him and make him mine.

I wasn’t smart enough or beautiful enough to be 'groomed' for jobs that might have potential for moving one up in the world, but I was good at tinkering with stuff, taking things apart and putting them back together again, so I was put in classes where we were taught how to fix mechanical things, things like aero cars and bikes. I liked it. It made me feel useful. It gave me the illusion that I had a future. And then I turned thirteen and I was shown the front gates.

“Good luck. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

The prospect of being booted out into the real world didn’t scare me. It was the fate shared by most of the orphans that survived Guardian. No, I wasn’t afraid of life outside of Guardian; I was afraid of leaving Riki behind. He’d be there for another three years while I was on the outside, and I wouldn’t be able to protect him. Not that he couldn’t protect himself at that point, but I was the one he let hold his hand and fuck it all to hell if I was going to let anyone else touch him. I had no choice, of course, but to wait and hope that he would make it out of there still remembering me. Meanwhile, I passed the time hanging out with my fellow block mates who had 'graduated' from Guardian alongside me: Luke, Sid, and Norris. We trolled the boulevards of Midas at night stealing what we could in order to survive, and fighting other mongrels who tried to steal from us in turn. There was nothing organized about it; it was just a bunch of young punks fending for themselves amongst a rabble of other losers in Ceres.

The days went by in a blur. I was lonely for affection. I’d never even tried to have sex with Riki when I was at Guardian, never even kissed him on the mouth though I had wanted to. He was so young, even if he was tough beyond his years, and I wanted him to keep a part of his innocence intact and untouched until he was ready to give it all up to me. I knew other boys were 'doing it' at Guardian, but Riki wasn’t one of them. Riki was special. Once I got out, I hooked up here and there for basic mindless fucking—one-night-stands were easy and plentiful in the slums where everyone was male and horny as shit—but in my heart I was saving myself for Riki. Just Riki and no one else. It never occurred to me that we _wouldn’t_ pair up eventually. Though I had left Riki a virgin at Guardian, we hadn’t hidden our friendship either while we were there. Everyone knew we were 'together.' We found that out the hard way when the Mothers moved me to a dormitory in a different wing after discovering that I was spending practically every night in his bed. 

“I swear I’m not fucking him!” I protested. But then I 'graduated' a month later and that was the end of that. Not having him in my arms at night was something I would have to live with for the next three years. “Will you wait for me?” I asked as we stood at the gates saying our goodbyes. My heart was in my throat but I wasn’t about to start bawling my eyes out in front of the other guys.

“Yeah, I’ll wait for you,” Riki said. Then he stood on his toes and hugged me tight, mumbling into my shoulder, “Don’t forget about me, Guy.” 

He wasn’t quite ten yet and his face was still a little babyish, but his eyes…his eyes told a different story when I smiled into them. There was so much determination and strength in those black orbs, I could do nothing but believe in him. “When you get out,” I told him, “it’s gonna be you and me, Riki. Forever.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guy is someone I feel rather conflicted about. In many ways, he was exactly what Riki needed early on in his life and there is nothing quite like one's first love. So many bad decisions are made later on because of this first love between Riki and Guy. Ugh.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There’s an OC in this chapter but I’m only using him to flesh out Guy’s character.

You’d think I’d jump Riki’s bones the second we met up again, right? Well, first I’d want to get down on one knee and ask him to be my pairing partner, and _then_ we’d bang. Me taking Riki’s virginity is what would seal the deal for us. That’s how I envisioned it—our long-awaited, magical reunion—but even the best laid plans can go awry, and I hadn’t actually planned anything beyond daydreaming about that moment. What I _did_ have under my belt was three years of sleeping around and learning the ins and outs of sex. I wasn’t as horny as Luke or Sid, who were out cruising almost every night for fresh meat, but I was probably looser than Norris, who hadn’t paired up exactly but had found himself a musclebound mechanic twice his age to treat him nice. Maxi was the name of his wannabe sugar daddy and even though Norris wasn’t ready to settle down yet, Maxi was willing to wait for that commitment. He was older and had the patience that came with age. That’s what I would be to Riki, I told myself: the older and more patient partner, the one who would have his back.

So, yeah, I ran around, sowed my wild oats. A man should know what to do in the sack, it was only expected and a matter of pride. I never once forgot about Riki, he was always front and center in my mind and heart, but one of my fuck buddies—a guy named Matt—became a regular, twice-a-week roll in the hay. Matt was my own age, but I didn’t know him from Guardian. He hadn’t gone through Guardian at all because he wasn’t from Ceres. He was from an off-world colony and had been visiting Midas with his parents on a three-week vacation Visa. On the second day, his parents were mugged and stabbed, probably by a gang of mongrels from Ceres, ironically, and their money and identification were stolen. For those with money, citizenship, and proper IDs, Midas was the ultimate playground, but for those with no money, citizenship, or official IDs, Midas was hell and Matt found himself trapped.

He was playing video games at the arcade next door to the casino while his parents were at the gambling tables. There was a loud ruckus in the street but Matt finished his game before bothering to go outside to see what the fuss was all about, only to find his parents lying on the pavement bleeding and dead. Midas security showed up, but with all their identification stolen, there was no way for Matt to prove who his parents were or even that he was their son. He bolted in a panic; he had no other living relatives to call for help and he was afraid he would be deported to some godforsaken detention center or sent to a slave labor camp or worse. 

That’s what he told me when I first met him. Matt was very good-looking, with blond hair and blue eyes and refined features. He didn’t look like a slumdog at all, and he had a tattoo on the back of his neck with letters I couldn’t read. It was some kind of foreign script, so I had no reason to doubt his story about being from elsewhere. He told me he fled to Ceres after his parents were killed—one didn’t need any identification papers to stay in the slums—and had been living off the kindness of strangers for months, relying on food and shelter provided by various lovers, of which he had many, not surprisingly. What _did_ surprise me was when Matt got it into his head that we should pair up for good. Why me? We had been seeing each other regularly for almost half a year and he knew I was waiting for _someone_ —I never lied to him—but for some crazy reason he thought that _someone_ could be _him_. When Riki was finally due to leave Guardian and come back into my life, I knew I had to get rid of Matt. I wasn’t about to try anything with Riki if Matt was hanging over my head. A lot of guys are okay with that sort of thing—just fucking around all over the place, sniffing at anyone’s crotch, getting their rocks off with no mind to settling down—but I knew what I wanted and I wanted Riki.  

I tried to let Matt down easy. With Riki’s thirteenth birthday coming in a week, I invited Matt for drinks at one of the local dive bars. “Listen, Matt, I won’t be seeing you anymore.” I took a big gulp of the cheap stout to give myself courage. “It’s been fun, but it’s time to move on, you know what I’m saying?”

Matt took an even bigger swig out of his bottle of stout, his face scrunched up like he was trying to solve a complicated math problem. “No,” he replied after a long pause, “I don’t know what you’re saying. We got a good thing going.” His blown pupils and red face told me the stout was kicking in. He was pale-skinned and his cheeks always flushed when he was tripping. He leaned in close, bumping shoulders with me. “Hey, Guy, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?”

“Matty,” I replied, my patience wearing thin even though the room was getting fuzzy around the edges and my resolve was softening, “we’ve been riding a bike that never had wheels to begin with.” My attempt at levity flew like a lead balloon and things went downhill from there. First he cried, hoping for some pity, then he shouted, looking for a fist fight, then he threatened, refusing to be scorned without consequence.

“Who is he?” Matt hissed, his words slurred and spit flying. “What’s he got that I don’t? Is he prettier than me? You telling me he can suck your dick better than I can?” At that, he climbed into my lap in the booth we were sitting in, his voice dropping an octave lower. “You telling me he can take your cock better than I can?” Then he started grinding on my junk and purring, “You know you can give it to me hard, make me swallow you up inside me, make me scream and cum for you. You going to throw all that away? We’re so good together, Guy, aren’t we? How about it, for old time’s sake?”

 _One more time_ , I thought to myself. _Just one more time and then we’re done_.

Big fucking mistake.

The same day me and the boys met Riki outside the gates of Guardian to take him home to the slums, I caught Matt stalking me. He was standing on the opposite street corner smoking a cigarette and glaring daggers in my direction. 

“Hey, you guys go on ahead,” I said, trying my best to sound casual. “I wanna run a few errands…you know, pick up a few things to celebrate Riki’s graduation.” 

Luke, Sid and Norris all assumed I meant I’d hit up a few dealers for some contraband smokes and they were all for it, whooping and hollering and fist-bumping as they got on their bikes. The pure joy on Riki’s face made my heart stop in my chest. He was taller now, a little more filled out and, holy hell, he was so fucking beautiful. I wanted so bad to kiss him, but Matt would have seen and I knew he would totally flip his shit. I had to make sure Riki never knew about him. “Go on, Riki. I won’t be long.” 

As soon as they all left, I ran across the street, the anger boiling inside me.

“What are you doing, Matty?” I didn’t even try to hide my fury. “I told you I didn’t want to see you no more. It was supposed to be one and done! Remember? You promised me!” 

“Is that him?” he asked, ignoring everything I said and pointing his finger at Riki as he sped off on the back of Sid’s bike. The look in Matt’s eyes told me that he was as pissed as I was. “Is that the one you’ve been waiting for? Your special _someone_? You’re throwing me over for that black-haired _runt_?” That almost made me laugh because Matt wasn’t any taller than Riki, but his next words turned my blood to ice. “I’m going to kill that little punk. I’m going to cut off his dick and then I’m going to chew it up and spit it out in your fucking—”

I punched Matt in the face. When he didn’t go down right away, I punched him again. He went down that time, so I kicked him, stomped my boots into his guts until he was spitting blood and curled up into a ball of agony. He was begging me to stop, making noise that would draw attention, so I dragged him into an alley and continued to punch and kick him until he was silent; his face looked like a slab of raw meat. Then I walked around the block searching, searching until I found what I was looking for. I picked up the empty bottle of stout, smashed it onto the concrete, and made my way back to Matt. He was still lying on the ground, groaning and incoherent. I grabbed each of his arms and slashed his wrists with the broken bottle. Then I slashed his neck and slammed his head into the pavement until he was unconscious.

“Nighty-night, Matty. Have a good long sleep.”

I walked back to my bike feeling light as a feather. My hands were shaking, but I was floating on a cloud. I was free of that ball and chain and now I could make Riki mine. I rode almost all the way to our hangout before I remembered I was supposed to pick up smokes. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I groaned as I cut a sharp one-eighty and made my way to the block where all the dealers peddled their wares. I was hoping to score some Black Moons—an illegal type of cigarette laced with the sweetest narcotic and only available on the Black Market—but no one had any of the good stuff. I settled for the next best thing, a dime bag of weed and a decent bottle of stout, figuring it was better than nothing.

“What the fuck took you so long?” grumbled Luke when I walked in the door an hour and a half later. The guys had already started drinking the usual cheap stuff and were well on their way to getting toasted. “Stop off for a blowjob or something?”

“Nah,” I said, throwing the small plastic bag of buds onto the table by the couch. “I asked all over for the good stuff, but no one was dealing.” I sat down next to Riki on the sofa and took the cheap stout out of his hand, exchanging it with the bottle of good stout. “Here, Riki, welcome home.”

“Thanks.” Riki’s voice was a lot lower than what it had been three years ago. His cheeks were still smooth, but he had definitely hit puberty, that was for sure. “What happened to your hands?”

“Huh?” I looked down and saw that my knuckles were all bloodied; there was blood on my shirt and jacket, too. I flexed my hands and all the aches and pains finally registered. The adrenalin must have worn off…I remembered I had killed somebody. It wasn’t the first time. The law of the slums was kill or be killed. Killing for self-defense was accepted, respected, and that is what I had done. Matt had threatened me; even worse, he had threatened Riki, and I could not have that. He got what he deserved. My conscience was clear, so it was easy to lie. “Oh, yeah, that…I ran into a bunch of those Hyper Kids from Jeeks. I had to put a few of them down.” 

Riki’s eyes flared open. “Hyper Kids? Jeeks?”

He wanted to hear everything about the teenage slumdogs that were running wild in Ceres, the gangs that were forming and fighting to stake their claim on territory. That’s when I saw it again, that fire in Riki’s eyes. “Why don’t we form a gang, too?” he asked. By then, he was off the ratty sofa and stalking around the room, thirteen years old and already grasping the reins. “We need a name if we’re gonna be a gang,” he said, as if us being a gang was a done deal.

We all chimed in, calling out all sorts of dumb shit and agreeing on nothing, yipping and yapping like a bunch of wolves howling at the full moon. Finally, Norris had an idea. He disappeared into another room—our hangout was an abandoned building which used to serve as an old career placement center back when jobs still existed in Ceres—and then returned with something blocky. It was a dictionary in _print_.

“Holy shit!” exclaimed Luke. “How old is that thing? It must be fucking _prehistoric_.”

Prehistoric or not, it served its function. Norris plunked it down onto the table and said, “Who wants to do the honors?”

“I’ll do it,” Riki said. There was no hesitation in his voice.

Sid laughed and clapped Riki on the back. “Yeah, let the ‘graduate’ pick the name.” 

With that, Riki flipped the dictionary open to a random page and, eyes closed, set his finger down. He opened his eyes and read aloud the word underneath his finger. “Bison.”

Bison it was. And Riki became our leader that night. It wasn’t like we took a vote or anything formal like that, but we were mongrels and all slumdogs recognize an alpha and naturally fall in line. For three years, Luke, Sid, Norris and I had just fucked around without purpose, living hand to mouth and not thinking beyond our noses, but with Riki in our midst, everything snapped into focus. He was our compass pointing us true north. He would lead us onward and upward and out of this stinking shithole. We were filled with hope and excitement and got completely wasted on weed and stout, so wasted it took two days to come down from our high, and another two days to recover from coming down. It took me another two days to steal enough cash cards to buy Riki a nice dinner at a decent bar. By then, I was over the nightmares I had been having about Matt. Matt who? There was only Riki.

So it was almost a week after he left Guardian that I finally made a move on Riki. It was painful to wait so long, but I had already waited the three years since I had graduated, and the three years prior in Guardian, too. Six years and six days. An eternity, but it was worth every single second, because when he let me kiss him, let me make love to him, I knew it would be me and him forever.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, now that I’ve gotten Guy set up for the time being, I can go back to Riki and Iason in the next chapters. Thanks for your patience.
> 
> Also, in case you don’t know already, Notre Dame in Paris has been burning for hours. I can’t even begin to express how heartbroken I am for the people of France, for all that is good and wonderful. To see one of the most beautiful Gothic cathedrals in all of Europe be lost to the world is devastating. I can only be grateful that I was able to see and experience that amazing architectural masterpiece in person when I was in Paris years ago, a city that is truly magnificent.
> 
> Update 4/16/19: After 15 hours the fire is out! The roof and spire are gone, but thankfully, the rest of the structure is fairly intact. There is talk of rebuilding...I'm keeping my fingers crossed.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think it's important to keep in mind that Riki is only fifteen when he first meets Iason. In both versions of the anime, his character design makes him look quite a bit older and I think in the 2012 anime version he tells Katze that he's eighteen (correct me if I am wrong) at his 'job' interview, but in the novel he is fifteen and that's what I'm going with here in this fic. 
> 
> In the world of Ai no Kusabi, boys grow up fast in Ceres and are considered adults at thirteen, but the legal age of independence does little to change the fact that a teenager is still a teenager in mind and body, and feeling emotions with a newness and intensity that is only mitigated by time and experience.

After that humiliating SNAFU in the love hotel, I avoided Midas like the plague for a few weeks. The thought of crossing paths with that blond freak left my insides twisted into a knot of anxiety. Every time I closed my eyes, I kept seeing his unnaturally blue ones staring back at me and making me feel like I was nothing more than a piece of shit stuck on the bottom of his shoe. I wanted to rip his fucking head off! And then I’d remember my own actions that night—running my mouth like an idiot, provoking him in that room, making those embarrassing noises—and I’d want to punch myself in the face so I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore. I couldn’t stand it, my pride couldn’t take it, so I spent my days kicking ass all over Ceres.

“Riki’s on a fucking rampage!” I heard people say behind my back. “He’s gone berserk!”

The boys in my own gang were saying it to my _face_ —with admiration, of course—and I gobbled it all up and used it as fuel for more ass-whooping, carving out new territory for Bison and putting down any mongrel who stood in my way, as if all that tough guy posturing could cover up my secret shame. What that Blondie had done to me…he’d cut off my balls and I needed to regrow a new pair of brass ones so bad. Going ape shit on everyone was the only way I knew how to salvage my pride—my pride which he had finger-fucked into oblivion!—and getting bombed on stout was the only way to make me forget what had happened that night for a few hazed out hours.

Tripping on stout also enabled me to tolerate Guy’s touch after that Blondie had enjoyed his high and mighty way with me. Ever since my first time with Guy, I’ve always let him take the lead in intimacy. In public, I was the head of Bison, but in private, Guy was the man in charge of my body and I liked it that way. He always had my back in a fight with other gangbangers, was always there for me to lean on through thick and thin. He would die for me and I trusted him completely; giving myself to him in bed was my way of paying him back for his love and loyalty and I considered it a fair trade. If he was in the mood, then we did it, end of story. If I wasn’t in the mood, I kept my mouth shut, probably the only time I ever kept my mouth shut. I wouldn’t have compromised or acquiesced for anyone but Guy; that’s how it was between me and him: we were pairing partners in word and deed. But after my run-in with that Blondie, I just couldn’t stomach the idea of sex, even with Guy, who was always good to me in bed. That part didn’t change; Guy was the same as ever—patient, considerate—even when I started telling him I was too hung over or too sore from a fight, he would kiss me and be content with me jacking him off or blowing him. Sometimes he’d rub one out next to me while I pretended to sleep. I don’t know if he actually believed I was asleep, but he never complained. He’d just cum on me and then clean me up and whisper, “I love you, Riki.” He always said that and I knew he meant it even if I wasn’t returning his affection like I used to. 

When I finally came around to letting him fuck me again, it didn’t feel the same. I don’t know how to explain it. I knew it was all in my head; I knew it _shouldn’t_ feel any different once we got down to it, sex was sex, but it did. What used to feel so good, so right, so _enough_ …it felt…like it was from afar and muted, like it wasn’t enough at all, like my body wasn’t mine anymore. And that wasn’t even the worst of it. I kept hearing the sound of his voice—that supremely conceited voice saying the most demeaning things in the softest, silkiest tone—and smelling his clean, pure, masculine scent. Each time Guy touched me, I wanted to scream, “No, not that way!” And I would remember the way the Blondie had touched me instead…and wish that Guy would do it like _him_.

It drove me insane, the memory of that night, it made me want to tear off my own skin and crawl into another body altogether just to get away from myself. My head was so fucked up and I didn’t know how to _un-fuck_ it. I was so stupid, I had been such a fool to think I could give myself to that Blondie to pay my debt and then walk away like nothing happened. I’d never been with anyone but Guy. Most mongrels would fuck anything that moved if they weren’t paired up, but I had waited for Guy and knew only his touch. Even so, I thought I could be like the others. I thought I could have sex with someone and let it be meaningless. I didn’t know anything! I hated my life like never before, this joke of an existence in Ceres where every day was just one pointless exercise in bullshit and every night was proof of my own pathetic infidelity.

“Guy, don’t you want to get out of this hell hole?”

We were lying in bed, our bellies full because we had managed to steal more cash cards than usual that evening. Our go-to fence, Zach, had given us a good exchange rate, so we blew most of the money on a meal and drinks before hitting a club for some dancing and cruising. Well, Sid and Luke were on the hunt. Me and Guy and Norris and Maxi danced our asses off. At four in the morning we called it a night and went home. Guy wanted to play hide-the-sausage, of course, and I guess I did too because he went at me rougher than usual—maybe he was fed up with the way I’d been so reluctant in bed lately; I couldn’t blame him—and it felt good. When he grabbed my wrists and pinned me down, something he wasn’t in the habit of doing, I finally felt a wave of desire roll through me.

“Fuck, yeah,” I moaned underneath him. “Guy…fuck me…harder! Harder!” We were both pretty wasted and even though he was normally careful with me, he did like I asked him to and, yeah, he gave me a good pounding and all it took was ten tugs on my cock for me to shoot my load. For a few moments, I didn’t have a care in the world. The trouble was the euphoria didn’t last all that long. As I came down from my high, reality sank its teeth into me once more and settled back into my gut. I lit up a cigarette and grumbled, “If I don’t leave this place, I’m gonna rot from the inside out. We’re both gonna be old with nothing to show for if we don’t do something about it. I can’t go on living like this. I have to get out of here. _We_ have to get out of here.”

The look of confusion on Guy’s face told me he didn’t feel the same way. Or maybe it wasn’t confusion. Maybe it was concern instead. There were plenty of slumdogs who had tried to make their way out of the filth only to come crawling back to Ceres, defeated and ostracized by their own kind. Nobody wanted to be reminded of how low things could go, so most didn’t bother to raise their heads from the primordial slime at all. Why embarrass yourself? Trash was trash; no matter how you packaged it, it still stank.

“I suppose,” Guy finally said, the smile on his lips clashing with the sadness in his grey eyes, “if anyone were to find a way out, it’d be you, Riki. Just don’t leave me behind.”

***

On a Wednesday afternoon a week later, I found myself on a wild goose chase. The night Zach had fenced our stolen cash cards, he had also given me a tip on a possible courier job. Some acquaintance of his was supposedly looking for an extra hand and was willing to pay well. If the lead had come from anyone else, I would have blown it off as too suspicious. No one legit and in their right mind would knowingly hire a mongrel from Ceres, but Zach had a reputation as a straight shooter.

“The job is likely to be on the risky side,” he reasoned.

It seemed to make sense to me at the time. Dangerous jobs usually pulled in people with nothing to lose, and that was me in a nutshell. I was desperate to make some money and buy my way out of Ceres and I had to start _somewhere_. Gangbanging all day and drinking all night wasn’t going to move me forward, so I had taken the business card Zach had handed to me and slipped it into my back pocket. The guys were waiting for me around the corner and I didn’t make mention of it. I figured if Zach wanted to pass the lead on to anyone else, he could do it himself.

There was a date and a time and what looked to be an address written on the back of the card: WED 15:30 MOGA-E-[R+B] 805 (#07291). I couldn’t make head or tails of the ‘address’ and ended up spending a whole day at a public computer terminal in a coffee shop searching through all the Midas street maps and business directories online. If only I had bothered to look at the card when Zach had given it to me, I could have saved myself a shitload of aggravation, but I sure as fuck wasn’t going to go shuffling back to Zach and admit I was a dumbass. Luckily, I knew that Moga was a ward in Midas. I guess all those nights of prowling the streets lifting wallets came in handy in more ways than one. Eventually, through a process of elimination and constant swearing and too much caffeine, I narrowed it down to a high-rise building that seemed to house an ‘escort club.’ Great. Just my luck.

Well, if I was to be some kind of stripper/hooker slipping illicit goods (drugs, likely) to some middleman, then I might as well walk in the front door like I belonged there. To my surprise, no one stopped me. I waltzed right through the main lobby to the bank of elevators without being patted down by security or being tossed out on my ass like I expected. What the fuck? I punched the button for the eighth floor and headed for room #805 when I exited. At the door was a keypad and I tapped in the numbers 0-7-2-9-1. There was a beep and the light above the keypad turned from red to green. I let myself in.

A man was sitting behind a desk—he looked to be around ten years older than me and was dressed in a fancy suit—with auburn red hair which he let fall to one side of his face. He offered no greeting; just a no-nonsense, “Name?”

Okay, so that’s how it was going to be. “Riki,” I replied just as succinctly.

“Age?”

“Almost sixteen.”

That seemed to satisfy some kind of requirement, because he beckoned me to a chair in front of his desk. I sat down and glanced around at the large, almost empty office, before letting my eyes rest on the scar running along the left side of his face. _So that’s why he keeps his hair longish in front_. He introduced himself as Katze. Just Katze. It wasn’t unusual for people to go by one name in Ceres. Slumdogs were raised in the orphanage and didn’t know their parents, so going by just your given name was common; we simply didn’t know our family names. But I was sitting in an office in Midas and this Katze fellow looked to be successful and well-groomed, but for the scar. A man like him could afford to have that scar removed, but I kept my curiosity in check and listened to him tell me what the ‘job’ entailed. By the time I left that office I felt my luck changing for the better. He had hired me to work for him as a courier, just as Zach had said the job would be, and this Katze didn’t even mind that I was a mongrel from Ceres. I would be working for him—in the Black Market, no less—starting from the bottom. That didn’t put me off. I mean, shit, I was already at rock bottom, so I figured I could only go up from there, and up is where I wanted to go. I made up my mind to work my ass off. I would do my job, prove my worth, and take Guy with me to a better place.

“Guy,” I laughed to myself as I made my way back to the slums. “You’re gonna be so proud of me.” I didn’t plan on telling Guy that I had landed a paying job. No. I would work hard and save up and then, when I had racked up enough money, I would surprise him. “I told you, didn’t I?” That’s what I would say to him when the time came. “I told you I’d get us out of here.” All those nights in Guardian when Guy had come to my bed and kept me warm…it was the memory of those times that got me through all the misery of the three years without him, when each of my block mates, one by one, died or just…disappeared. It was Guy and the love he showed me from day one that kept me going. I owed him and I always pay my debts.

 


	8. Chapter 8

I was partnered up with this older guy named Alec. I figured that Katze didn’t trust a mongrel like me to do my job without supervision, but then I understood the ‘why’ of it when I began making deliveries to off-world colonies. I had never been outside of Ceres or Midas, much less beyond the planet of Amoï, and Alec was a seasoned pilot. He was always in the driver’s seat whenever Katze had us ship something far, but he taught me how to read a control panel, how to navigate, how to override the default codes if need be. It felt good to actually learn how to do something useful for once. I can’t tell you how many times I wished Guy were with me. This sort of thing was right up his alley; he fixed small engines and mechanical devices to make cash whenever he could but, shit, he’d cream his pants if he ever had the chance to tinker on an interstellar jet. On longer flights, I’d sit back and daydream about Guy steering us through space to somewhere far away, maybe even straight into the sun where we’d burn up in a glorious ball of fire. These self-indulgent fantasies would always end up with that Blondie’s face appearing out of nowhere, though; maybe it was that thick long golden hair of his…so fucking irritating! I couldn’t even enjoy a vision of my own death without that Elite douchebag spoiling it for me.

Unlike Guy or that jerk-off Blondie, Alec was a big talker. I guess for him it helped pass the time, but sometimes I wished he’d cut the incessant chatter. Then I would remember that Katze had told me to keep my mouth shut and my ears open, so I’d make myself listen to all of Alec’s stories about the myriad places he had visited and the various species he had fucked and all I could think was, “Is this how people get when they’re old, constantly reminiscing about this and that shit?” Still, he was decent enough towards me. The other guys in the warehouse who made it a point to provoke me would back down if Alec was around. When he hired me, Katze had warned me that if I got in to fights, he’d fire my ass, and even though it stung my pride to let Alec stand up for me, I was grateful. I needed this job and I knew Katze was giving me the shortest length of rope to hang myself.

Too much talking aside, Alec’s only other quirk was that he _always_ wore dark glasses. Th’ fuck was up with _that_? It wasn’t until we’d been on who-knows-how-many delivery runs that Alec and I started going out for drinks at the end of a work week just to blow off some steam. We were at a bar on the outskirts of Midas after returning from an interstellar run when I finally asked him, “Alec, what’s with the dark glasses? Are you wasted all the time or something?” I had a few drinks in me already and I was in a snarky mood, and if Alec had figured out a way to fly a delivery cruiser while bombed, then I wanted in on the secret.

Alec just grinned at me. “You grew up in Ceres, am I right?”

“Yeah. Got a problem with that?”

“Nah. No problem. But you mongrels sure like barking up the wrong tree, don’t ya?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I slugged down the rest of my stout and ordered another round from the bartender. “For the old man, too,” I said. I was feeling generous. When we had arrived back at the docking station, I had logged in our hours and I knew that the money for our completed mission would be in our bank accounts almost instantaneously. It was weird to have enough money to buy things, indulgent things, but it was money I had earned legitimately, even if it was as a courier in the Black Market. I had completed the work and done it honestly and so had Alec. 

“I’m just making an _observation_ , Riki,” Alec told me. “There’s no crime in that.”

“Quit changing the subject.” I lit a cigarette and Alec did the same. “C’mon, what’s with the dark glasses? If you’re not high…you cross-eyed or something? Shit! Is that it?” I laughed at the image in my mind of Alec looking like an utter…

Alec removed his dark glasses and I stopped laughing real quick. I had never seen anyone with eyes like that. They were _cat_ eyes, I kid you not! And I was freaked out! “Ho-ly shit!” I had no idea Alec wasn’t from this neck of the woods, his speech and accent…they sounded so _local_ to my ears. It was then that I realized just how little I knew about everything, how _small_ my own world had been.

“Yeah,” Alec chuckled, “most people react the same way. That’s why I wear the dark glasses. Happy now?” 

I took a long swig of stout as soon as the bartender passed me a new bottle. I felt like a total dumbass, not because I had never rubbed shoulders with other species—off-world tourists were a common sight in Midas—but because I knew that Alec and his people were known for a certain skill. “You a mind reader?” Fucking hell, I couldn’t even count the number of times I had called Alec all sorts of choice names in my head for whatever idiotic reasons.

“Not quite.” Alec drank from his own bottle, his dark glasses back on to my relief. “My kind are highly intuitive. We have sort of a…sixth sense. We can pick up clues, signals, whatnot. It’s all just…a matter of _awareness_. But you know how it is. People are afraid of anything _different_.”

A long moment of awkward silence passed between us. I wasn’t sure if he was just pretending to be nice or if he really couldn’t read my mind; the fact that he didn’t seem too upset with me made me think he was being sincere. I let the stout wash away my paranoia. So, Alec was _different_ and it actually made me feel a little better about myself. I was different, too, with my dark hair and dark eyes. I had always stood out, not just in my looks and not in a good way. Unlike Alec, though, I couldn’t hide my uniquely crap personality behind a pair of dark glasses. In Ceres, my anti-social belligerence was respected—it might even be considered a twisted form of charisma—but everywhere else I was nothing more than an unapologetic bastard. 

“What’s that?” Alec asked.

“Huh?”

“That thing in your hand…what is it?”

I didn’t even know I had anything in my hand, but when I glanced down, there it was: the gold coin. I must have reached into my pocket and started playing with it like I often did when I wasn’t quite in the moment. The gold coin that the Blondie had tossed onto the bed that horrible night…I had kept it even though every cell in my body had screamed, “Throw it away!” And whenever I was nervous or needed a distraction, I would take it out of my pocket and flip it through my fingers. I don’t know why I did that; maybe it made me believe I was rich. It was so stupid, but Alec had noticed me playing with the coin and he seemed to be super interested in it.

“Let me see that thing,” Alec said.

I handed it over to him, thinking nothing of it until his expression changed from one of curiosity to one of utter astonishment. 

“Holy shit! Where did you get this?” he asked. 

I was more than taken aback by his reaction, then suspicious. Did he think I had stolen something of worth, maybe from some rich citizen of Midas? “I _found_ it, okay. I didn’t steal it!” I said defensively.

“No fucking way!” he replied, staring at the coin in his hand. “Do you know what this is?” 

“Th’ fuck?” Shit, what was it? Illegal currency? Was it counterfeit? Would I be arrested for being in possession of such a thing? “I swear, I didn’t steal it!” 

Alec held the shiny disc in front of my face as if it were proof of some crime I had committed. “ _This_ is an Aurora coin.”

“What the fuck is that?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

“Are you sure you grew up here? Dang. This is Pet currency. You know what a _Pet_ is, don’t you?”

Well…yeah. Everyone had heard of Pets, even if one never had the pleasure of owning and fucking one. Pets were creatures bred specifically to serve as living, breathing sex dolls—as opposed to the mechanical sex droids designed for those with a tech fetish—and they were auctioned off at Mistral Park. People would come from all over the place to gawk at these genetically perfected creatures. They were kept as slaves by their masters for the sole purpose of debasing themselves in every way imaginable, and the most expensive high-end Pets were purchased by the Elite of Tanagura. No one else could afford those Pets, ones that were bred by the Academy. The Pets that were thrown away by the Elites when they tired of them were then sold off to the Midas brothels, where the wealthy citizens could buy their sexual services by the hour.

The mongrels in Ceres were positioned at the bottom of the garbage pile, but even a mongrel counted himself fortunate because being a Pet was worse than anything in the whole fucking world! Even if a mongrel was spat upon and possessed no human rights whatsoever, at least he was _free_ to live his life as he chose. A Pet had no choice, no freedom, and to a mongrel, that was worse than death. The fact that I had been given an Aurora coin—a Pet coin!—was like being branded the lowest scum of the planet. That fucking Blondie! If I had hated him before, I hated him a million times worse now. What Alec told me next only made my blood boil hotter.

“These coins, they have no real monetary value, but they would bring you a pretty penny on the Black Market. And _this_ one…” Alec pointed at a stylized symbol on one side of the coin, “only Pets owned by the _Blondies_ are given these coins. They’re highly collectible. Say…how _did_ you come by one?”

“I found it in the gutter,” I lied. Shit, shit, shit! When Alec handed the coin back to me, I stuffed it into my pocket, my stomach churning with fury and shame. You’d think I would have thrown it straight into the trash, right? But I didn’t. All I saw in front of me was that disgusting pervert, his blue eyes drilling a hole straight through my pride, his scent and fingers filling my body, his breath hot against my bare skin. I couldn’t let it go, the coin, because that coin held the memory of that Blondie and the things he had done to me, it told me that it had really happened, I hadn’t imagined it or dreamt it. I had _lived_ it. It wasn’t until later that I realized…I wanted to live it again, and again and again, until my entire world was nothing but the pain and pleasure he had shown me in all his terrible golden glory.

I guess, even as far back as that moment, I knew I had betrayed Guy. I had done a shitty thing that night with that Blondie, but I couldn’t admit the truth of it. So I told myself that the Blondie was some sick deviant; it justified how the very thought of him put me into a rage. He had violated and shamed me, even though I was the one who had gone after him. And Guy…I was such an asshole, the way I treated him, pushed him away, neglected him. That night after leaving Alec, I stopped by the liquor store and picked up an expensive bottle of wine and headed to Guy’s place. Learning about the Aurora coin made my guilt even worse and I wanted to bring Guy a peace offering. You see, we weren’t living together anymore. As soon as I earned enough money working for Katze, I rented my own apartment. It was a total hole in the wall, but I wanted to get away from Guy even though my goal was to buy our way out of Ceres. Guilt will make you do all sorts of hurtful things, but the less I saw of Guy, the easier it was to live with what I had done.

“You know I’m working long hours,” I told Guy when I packed up my few things from his place. “The apartment is so much closer to my boss’ warehouse.” The look of hurt on Guy’s face cut me to the core and that’s why I made up my mind to get the hell out of there. I wouldn’t be able to deal with him; I loved him too much to see him suffer because of me.

“Who’s your boss, Riki?” Guy asked for the millionth time. “Does he treat all his employees like slaves? Shit, just quit the job if he’s working you to the bone. We don’t need the money!”

I finished stuffing what few clothes I had into a duffel bag and slung it over my shoulder. “We _do_ need the money, Guy. I’m getting us out of here, remember?” I stopped in front of him and rested my cheek on his shoulder. I wanted so bad to cry but nothing came out. My heart ached, but I was so empty inside all the same. “There’s nothing worse than this…living like we do. I want something better for us.” I pressed my face into his neck and breathed him in and there he was, the same boy who had held me all those nights in Guardian and kept me warm. “I love you, Guy. You know that don’t you?”

Guy put his arms around me and that’s when I felt the first tears come finally. It was a relief to let it out. I sobbed into him and Guy squeezed me tighter and caressed my back, my shoulders, like he used to when we were just kids and so clueless about our future.

“Riki, what’s wrong? If you’re in trouble, all you have to do is tell me.”

I wiped my nose on my sleeve, disgusted with myself. “I’m not in trouble.” I wasn’t. I wasn’t! “It won’t be much longer,” I promised him as I headed out the door. “Be patient, Guy. I’ll have enough soon to get us both out of this shithole.” Katze had told me that the next shipment was for a client paying a steep fee and my cut would be three times what I normally made. If I could string together a few more of those jobs, then I could make good on my promise to Guy. We’d be gone from Ceres. Shit, maybe we’d be gone from Amoï altogether, and I’d be free of the biggest mistake of my life thus far, free of that Blondie and the memory of what I had done with him. 

When I showed up with the wine, Guy was shocked that I could afford to buy such a luxury item. He accused me of stealing it but I was too wasted to take offense. Instead, I flopped down on his bed, the room spinning around me, and laughed like an idiot. I had quit Bison when I started working for Katze and now I felt even further detached from Guy. Nothing made sense. I was working my ass off so I could leave the slums and take Guy with me, but I had also moved out and we hadn’t had sex in ages, we barely saw each other at all.

“Why won’t you tell me what’s going on with you, Riki?”

Guy was still standing by the sofa holding the bottle of wine, watching me with worry etched all over his face. He made no move to come near me and suddenly the space between us seemed like a chasm that couldn’t be bridged. I was bombed out of my head, but my heart had a mind of its own, and it wanted to go back to that place…that place before things went sideways, when it was just me and Guy and we loved each other with nothing terrible and golden coming between us.

I held out my hand to him and murmured, “Let’s do it, Guy.” I rarely ever initiated sex, but that night I wanted to feel close to him. He set the wine bottle on the coffee table and got into bed beside me. “Do you remember…the way it used to be?” I asked, reaching for him. In the dim light he looked so handsome, his grey eyes glistened and I just knew that as he held me with his gaze, I was still beautiful to him, I was still his Riki. He kissed me soft and sweet, just like the first time, and I was happy. “Our first kiss…” I said, letting the memory wash over me. I never thought for a moment that this one would be our last one.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter we check back in with Iason. I hope he's having a more exciting life than Riki.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part of this chapter was inspired by a truly hilarious video posted by shinnobineko55 on YouTube. Welp, I’m really sorry, but I couldn’t help myself. Blame it on my addiction to crack, pun intended. Be sure to watch the video (link provided at the end of this chapter) and then decide for yourself if this isn’t Iason’s ultimate dream scenario. Or is it Riki’s? Could probably go either way.

 

“Well?” I had half an hour before I needed to leave for a reception being held in Parthea for some Federation ambassadors and, never one to waste an idle moment, I called Katze for a weekly status report. His pale face appeared within seconds on my monitor, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Katze started chain smoking after he was relieved of his duties as my Furniture and insisted on keeping his current office in a dank dark basement beneath a pharmacy in a crummy part of Midas rather than in the posh suite of rooms I had reserved for him in a swank skyscraper. His idea of masochism wasn’t remotely funny. 

“All deliveries were on schedule,” he told me in his usual monotone, “although I had to fire one of the men in the warehouse.” 

“Reason?” 

“He was five minutes late.” 

“I see.” Katze was a stickler for details, a quality I valued. I held out my glass and Daryl, who was standing beside my chair dressed in the new light blue satin vest and trousers I had recently ordered for him as a reward for good work, immediately refilled my glass like the attentive little Furniture he was. I took a long sip of the wine and closed my eyes to better appreciate the subtle astringency of the tannins on my palate. These receptions for off-world diplomats currying economic favors and seeking political alliances were tedious but a necessary evil, and alcohol made it somewhat bearable. I could only imagine how inebriated Raoul would be. Gideon and Orphe and Aisha _lived_ for these events—it provided a stage on which they could show off their Elite superiority to mere mortals—but Raoul, with his scientist’s mindset, viewed humans as bipedal lab rats and could barely tolerate the charade. He had no patience for these meet-and-greet palm-greasing sessions and would usually sit in a corner twirling his golden locks in his fingers until he could sneak off without anyone noticing, or he’d play chess with a companion droid while his latest Pet sat at his feet blinking dumbly. I found the whole thing sadly entertaining and couldn’t help wondering if my favorite brother had already polished off a bottle or two in preparation. “Anything else?” I asked Katze, who had been waiting patiently for me to end the call. 

“The…uh…the mongrel you asked me to hire…”

“Yes. How is that piece of trash faring?” Those words rolling off my tongue— _that piece of trash—_ gave me tremendous satisfaction for some reason. I found myself smiling and savoring the wine even more.

“Surprisingly well,” Katze informed me.

“Oh? What’s his name again?” 

“Riki, Master. He’s followed all my instructions, completed his tasks on time.” There was a pause, and then Katze continued, “Some of the other men have a problem with his background. They provoke him.” 

“And?”

“He’s gotten into a few fights; nothing serious. If they attack, he defends himself.”

I laugh with genuine amusement. “How mongrel-like.” The scene easily unfolds in my head: that filthy slum dog baring his teeth, hands curled into fists, crouched low and spitting fire while facing off with a much larger opponent who lunges forward and body slams the little scoundrel into the floor, grapples him in a chokehold until his slender body goes limp like a tiny ragdoll. Pure delight courses through my veins.

“Um…Master…do you think it wise to pursue this endeavor? The way I see it, it—”

“If I wanted an _opinion_ ,” I interrupt, annoyed that Katze took me out of my violent reverie, “I would consult with _Lord Am_.” My disgraced ex-Furniture is an excellent worker—in fact, he is indispensable to me in managing all the Black Market transactions in Midas—but his intelligence is what got him into hot water in the first place. The burden fell on me to remind him to color inside the lines. 

“I beg your forgiveness, Master, I was—”

“Yes, yes,” I interrupt again, “enough of the groveling, for crying out loud.” The image of Katze on his hands and knees after I had struck him with the crop and cut a deep gash across his face was something that often arose in my mind whenever he apologized. I found it to be immensely irritating. Wasn’t it more sensible to _not_ make a mistake in the first place? I had also offered to pay for that ugly scar to be removed, but Katze preferred to leave it be. That was also annoying. Humans! The ones with a semblance of intelligence and talent and originality were so rare, though, and that dark-haired, dark-eyed mongrel had sparked an interest in me. The next Pet auction would be held within the month and I couldn’t help but wonder what Raoul’s reaction would be if, instead of purchasing one of his brainless Academy purebloods, I were to take as my Pet a wild dog from the slums. Surely, my brother would have a conniption for the ages! I stifled my laughter as I gave Katze my final instructions for the night, “Have the mongrel deliver those twins. Gauge his reaction and report back to me.” 

It would be my own private joke and I only regretted that I would not be present in the room when that foul-mouthed cur was told to ship a pair of specially crafted Pets to one of the wealthiest collectors on the planet. Would he be curious? Jealous? Surely, a lowlife like him had never set eyes on such refined creatures. Would he want to rip their throats out, set upon them like a wolf on two helpless lambs and tear them limb from limb? Slum dogs were known to be impulsive and barbaric by nature, with no shame or morality, driven by the basest of human instincts. That dark-haired one had already given me a taste of such wildness, and traces of his peculiarly distinct pheromones were still vivid on my tongue. Breaking such a feral animal would present a new challenge, and the prospect of putting my hands on him again and bringing a savage beast to heel made my pulse quicken. Oh, how I wanted to bend him to my will! Those sweet cries he made that night were still ringing in my ears; all that pride ripped to shreds because of _me_ …it was like pulling the wings off a fly, only so much more satisfying. A fly didn’t put up much of a fight, but that mongrel had snarled and spat and cursed…to have a Pet such as _that_ to train… 

“Will that be all then?”

“Yes, Katze, that will be all.” The doorbell chimed just as my video conferencing monitor went dark and Daryl hurried to the main entrance to greet my visitor. I remained seated in my office chair enjoying my glass of wine. I still had almost fifteen minutes before I had to leave and I was in no hurry to arrive early to the reception. In another moment, I could smell Raoul’s cologne precede him into my office, then his cheek next to mine and the scent of a crisp Gewürztraminer on his breath as he gave me a chaste kiss. “Care for a Pinot noir?” I offered. 

“Why not?” Raoul replied. “I’m in a festive mood.” 

I swiveled around in my chair and saw that Raoul was wearing the gold and violet brocade jacket that I—or rather, Daryl—had purchased as a gift. I, in turn, had showed my appreciation for Daryl’s shopping acumen by having a new uniform tailored for him. The light blue satin was flattering against Daryl’s silvery-blond hair and he quickly poured Raoul a glass of Pinot. Standing behind Raoul and led by a decorative braided silk leash attached to a diamond studded collar was Raoul’s prized Pet, Mimea. Her short wavy hair was a pale lilac, her cupid bow lips bright red. She was petite with perky breasts befitting a young female Pet of pureblood and finest breeding. It was all quite nauseating, but I could see that Raoul was as pleased with the new jacket as he was with his Pet, one he had created in his own lab.

“Well, don’t you look stunning,” I praised. It was no lie. No one but Raoul could wear colors that would normally make your eyes bleed. Somehow, he was able to pull it off. Perhaps it was those emerald irises of his; they were so bright green that everything paled in comparison. I stood up and gave him a fraternal peck on the cheek in return. “Let’s sit out in the living room while we have our drink.” I led the way and noticed that Mimea was wearing a matching gold and violet barrette in her hair. _Oh Raoul, you are too much!_

“So,” Raoul said as soon as we made ourselves comfortable on the sofa and Mimea crouched at his feet. “I have found the ideal Pet for you. His name is Jenna and he would be perfect to mate with my Mimea. Let me warn you, though, Gideon has his eyes on Jenna, but if you place an early bid, then I’m sure you—”

I clamped a gloved hand over Raoul’s mouth, something I would never do in public for we Elites observe the strictest of social etiquette in front of others, but since we were in the privacy of my residence and Raoul and I were no strangers to touching each other in intimate ways when shielded from prying eyes, I felt compelled to nip this nonsense in the bud. I leaned in and whispered low to the side of Raoul’s face, “If Gideon wishes to acquire this Jenna, then allow the man his heart’s desire.” I darted my tongue out, tracing it along the shell of his ear before kissing Raoul on the cheek once more. All it took was the lightest tap on his chin for him to turn his face towards me. By the time I was done ravishing his mouth with my own, he had completely forgotten about this Pet named Jenna that I must purchase at the upcoming auction. Between the wine and the tongue calisthenics, Raoul was putty in my hands. His Pet Mimea, though, was another matter. I kept one eye on her as I kissed Raoul and saw her steal a glance up at us instead of keeping her eyes lowered to the floor. That one was going to be trouble, I thought. I had the overwhelming urge to crush her empty skull, but Raoul was so lovely in my arms, I dialed back my loathing for this creature and brought Raoul’s hand to my lips instead and kissed his gloved knuckles.

“Let’s get this over with, shall we?” I downed the rest of my wine and placed the empty glass on the table in front of the sofa. “We’ll make our appearances, then you can send your Pet to bed and we can play a round of pool.”

“Just pool?” asked Raoul, his green eyes darkening with naughty thoughts.

“If you refrain from annoying me with talk about Pets,” I told him, “then we can play with all sorts of rods and balls.” 

***

The following week, I happened to pay a visit to one of Raoul’s labs. He had been experimenting with a new type of biological military ‘weapon’ and, since I was in charge of dealing illegal arms, he had asked me to take a look and assess the viability of such a ‘product.’ The marine creature didn’t have all that many strategic applications, as far as I could tell, but my disappointment in its limited use was brushed away by a serendipitous meeting for I saw _him_ again. That’s right, my little dark-haired, dark-eyed mongrel had followed me somehow into the facility and now found himself trapped in the room in which the marine creature was kept. It was too funny! I had to hand it to him, though, the fact that he had gotten as far as that room. The entrance to the lab was protected by a security code known only to a few with high clearance and the mongrel had managed to hack into the system and gain access. Amazing!

Even better was the look on his face when I found him in a sheer panic. He was obviously frightened by what he had seen and then even more afraid when he couldn’t find the exit. Seeing him on the floor hyperventilating was a picture worth a thousand words.

“Do you need my assistance?” I asked. It took all my self-control not to burst into laughter when recognition dawned on him. There it was, that furious, insolent, defiant glare. Ah, it made me feel _alive_. “Didn’t Katze tell you that curiosity is what killed the cat?” I paused and let my words sink in before I added, “ _Riki_.” I can honestly say, I had never enjoyed such pleasure in the hundreds of years of my existence as I felt at that moment when his eyes widened with shock after I said his name. His name. Riki.

“Who the fuck are you?” he said in response.

The fear in his strangled voice was like a jolt of electricity down my titanium spine. I stood over him as he sat slumped against the wall of the holding cell, his breath coming in choked gasps, his heart beating so fast and loud I heard it like a drum pounding in my head and syncing with the beating of my own artificial heart in my chest. _Yes_. I was a god and he…he was nothing. Nothing but the wildest, untamed thing I wanted to _crush_. I wanted to destroy this thing, this beautiful dark animal, destroy it and mould it into something else, something I could call my own and make obey my every command. It was with supreme satisfaction that I answered his question. "Iason Mink." Never had saying my own name filled me with so much power.

_______

Here’s the video of [Riki vs Iason](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYVZxhAGC2A) in a WWE smackdown posted by shinnobineko55. If you’ve never played these old-timey two-player head-to-head type games, you’ve missed out on a shitload of fun.

 


	10. Chapter 10

You’d think that inviting that Blondie to the love hotel would be my worst call ever, right? Wrong! Like an idiot, I fucked myself over not even three months after that horrible decision. I caught a glimpse of that Elite douchebag riding in a taxi when I was on my way home from a delivery. I wasn’t thinking right and maybe it was the courier job that Katze had me do right beforehand that messed with my mind. 

Katze had called me to his office and when I arrived I found two freakish kids sitting on his sofa. “They’re twins,” Katze told me, “and I need you to deliver them to their new Master.”

These kids, what looked like a male and a female, weren’t fully human, but that’s not what unnerved me. It was the fact that they were so young that made my stomach turn. Some sick pervert was buying these things—they couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old—and I was the one who had to deliver them to be used as living sex dolls. Growing up in Guardian, I’d seen plenty of kids get beat up and abused in all sorts of ways, not just by the other kids, but by adults who were bribing the headmaster for ‘private time’ in one of the classrooms. I didn’t need to guess what was happening because the victims would always be sent to the infirmary with injuries or, worse, they would disappear altogether. Luckily for me, I was scrawny and what the Mothers and Sisters warned others as ‘prone to disobedience’ and a ‘biter’ so I was never targeted by the grown ups. I could defend myself just fine against the other kids, but these interspecies twins that Katze wanted me to deliver to someone halfway across Amoï were screwed for sure. I could only swallow my disgust and be grateful that Guy had waited for me, waited until I was thirteen before he put the moves on me, waited until I was ready for him and then treated me with a loving touch.

Maybe that’s why I flipped my shit when I saw the Blondie who had molested me that night; it brought up all kinds of bad memories. Maybe it was my guilt, too, about delivering those kids when I should have refused, but I was afraid that Katze would fire me if I disobeyed his order. This one job was paying triple what I normally earned and I was so close to racking up enough money to get me and Guy the hell out of Ceres that I just looked the other way. I _should_ have looked the other way, too, when I saw the Blondie going the other direction in the tunnel after I had returned from the delivery. I was on my way home. I was going to grab something to eat, shower, and pay Guy a rare visit. I was even thinking we’d have sex; it had been awhile and I was actually in the mood to get piped. Even if that didn’t happen, it would still be nice to sleep next to him rather than alone in my own dumpy apartment.

But no. I just had to do something as stupid as before. I turned my utility van around and followed the taxi, watched the Blondie exit the vehicle and then enter a door at the side of the tunnel. Katze had given me a watch with a built-in access override feature so I could bypass all the security stations on my various deliveries. It was a time saver since just one swipe of the device could get me past the tightest checkpoints. Otherwise, I’d have to sit on my ass for a good fifteen minutes, maybe even half an hour waiting for all the clearance protocols to be run and verified. It was one of the perks of working for Katze in the Black Market. The man could get around all the rules that everyone else had to follow. What a goddamn disaster for me, though.

I must have wandered around for a good ten minutes before I came to a door that actually opened, and then I found myself in an empty room with an aquarium built into the floor and a bizarre half-fish, half-human creature swimming around in the tank below my feet. It screeched at me and the high pitched sound piercing the low humming of machinery in the room had me scrambling for the door, a door which had somehow disappeared. Good thing there’s no one here to see me shitting my pants, I thought to myself. I’d never be able to live that down. Only, there _was_ someone who saw me panicking like a pussy, and that someone was very tall and very blond and had materialized like some shining god out of thin air to ask me if I needed help. It was _him_. Again! And for some reason he knew my name—he knew Katze’s name, too!—and that’s when fear took hold of me like never before. In all my life, I had never been so afraid, not when I was in Guardian, not when I was running wild in the streets of Ceres as the leader of Bison, not even when I had first come under the thumb of this Blondie in that love hotel. No, when he called me ‘Riki,’ I knew I was fucked beyond redemption, as fucked as those twins I had delivered to some wealthy pedophile. 

Within the half hour, my sorry ass was hauled off to Midas by some uniformed guards after my second run-in with that Blondie. Iason Mink. I had plenty of time to recall his name, and the sound of his voice echoing in that weird aquarium room, because I was taken to a non-descript building in Mistral Park, led into a sub-basement through a maze of hallways and locked in a small windowless room outfitted with a cot bolted to the concrete floor, a toilet, a sink, and a security camera installed on the high ceiling. It was a jail cell, but I wasn’t at the Midas Police Station; I knew what that building looked like and this wasn’t it at all. This was a building located next to the enormous exposition center where they held the Pet auctions. I was kept in that room for at least a week from what I could gather based on the number of meals that would be passed through the slot in the metal door. It was the only way I could judge time since I had been stripped of my watch and it was impossible for me to know if it was day or night. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling were never turned off and there was no clock on the bare walls. All I could do was pace around and scream up at the security camera.

“Where am I? Why am I here? Am I under arrest? What’s my charge?”

Nobody spoke to me, not the guards who brought my meals, not the man in the white lab coat—I assume he was a doctor of some sort—who took a sample of my blood and examined me head to toe not long after I was incarcerated. “Are you looking for lice or ticks? Think I got rabies?” I snarked. He injected me with something that made my head swim and my body go numb and listless. Maybe he was tired of listening to me barking at him, but at that point I could do nothing but lie on the cot like a ragdoll and let him poke and prod at me: my hair, my eyes, my teeth, my ears, my genitals. Then he left and I was dressed in a flimsy gown that barely covered my knees. I laid there waiting for the effects of the drug to wear off, ruing my own stupidity.

Why had I followed him? What was I even going to do with that Blondie anyway? It had all been so spur of the moment. One glimpse of him in that taxi and so much anger had exploded inside me like a bomb. I guess I wanted to confront him, shove that Aurora coin up his ass. “You fucked me up!” Is that what I wanted to say to him? I had every opportunity to vent my fury at him in that room, but I had merely gaped at him like a total spaz. The only words I had managed to get past my lips were, “Who the fuck are you?” I was so pathetic! His icy blue stare, his soft emotionless voice, his long blond hair framing his impossibly beautiful face like a golden halo…his dominating presence was like a poison seeping inside my mind, my body, my soul, like a drug that left me utterly paralyzed. And now I was in some kind of prison for what? Stalking a Blondie? Was that a capital offense warranting a death penalty? I had no idea. Maybe I was in trouble for trespassing, for breaking into a private facility? Which one was worse? I wasn’t allowed a phone call, but if I had been, who could I even reach out to for help? Guy? Katze? Shit, the Blondie had made it sound like he knew Katze. Did that mean that they were friends? Or enemies? Man oh man, if only I hadn’t been so impulsive and reckless, but like they say, hindsight is twenty-twenty and I was so blind to the present.

“Riki, you dumbass!” I berated myself as I prowled the narrow confines of my cell over the course of those monotonous days, waiting and wondering. Whenever the guards would shove my tray of food through the slot, I’d pound on the door and shout, “Let me out of here! Motherfuckers! Let me out or just fucking kill me already! How long are you gonna keep me in this shithole, goddamn it!”

It was the same thing every day—me pacing, pounding, shouting—and then one day the guards entered my room and tasered me without the slightest warning. The man in the lab coat came in behind them and injected me once again with that same numbing drug. I was put on a gurney and rolled down the hallway, then another hallway and into a washroom where I was hosed down and scrubbed by men in hazmat suits; my teeth were cleaned, my hair and nails were trimmed, and I was dressed in the sluttiest outfit I’d ever seen. Okay, so maybe Guy and I would rock matching crop tops in Ceres, but that was considered standard dress code among slumdogs. We were young and fit and showing off your ripped abs was a way to project dominance and power, but this…this flimsy two-piece sheer bikini they made me wear was doing nothing but screaming, “Hey, get a load of my nips and junk! I’m a whore! Who wants some cheap booty?”

Holy hell, my boys in Bison would die laughing if they saw me got up like this, or maybe they’d be creaming their pants, especially Luke and maybe Sid…Guy would probably want to bang me if he ever recovered from the shock…but then I was carted up an elevator and put in a large room with a bunch of other people, boys and girls who looked to be around twelve or thirteen and they were all dressed like I was in the same revealing outfits. One of the guards put a leather collar around my neck attached to a chain, which he held firmly in his hand. At the front of the collar dangled a metal tag. I couldn’t see what the tag said, but I could read the writing on the tags hanging from the collars around the necks of the other kids. On each tag was stamped a combination of letters and numbers. I had to assume my own tag had a similar letter/number combination.

The atmosphere inside the room was heavy with anticipation and a weird excitement, not from me, but from the wide-eyed boys and girls sitting quietly with their own chaperones. In the silence of the room, I could hear the muffled voice of a man calling out a series of currency amounts. My stomach dropped into my feet. I suddenly realized who these other kids were. I had delivered Pets for Katze and these kids were the right age and appearance and demeanor—they were barely pubescent, doll-like and docile—and the room we were in must be located right behind the stage of the auditorium. I looked around, my mouth dry with terror but my skin damp with sweat, my eyes searching for the exit. I had to get the fuck out of there! I was almost sixteen, for shit’s sake, a mongrel from Ceres and these kids were Pets from the various breeding mills. I didn’t belong here!

“There must be some mistake!” I rasped at the guard holding the chain attached to my collar. I tried to stand up but my legs weren’t working. Shit! When was that drug going to wear off? I had to make a run for it! My guard pulled the chain taut instead, giving it a jerk that almost wrenched my neck off my shoulders.

“Be quiet, you little punk ass bitch,” he muttered into my ear. “One more word out of you and I’ll make you sorry.”

Fuck that shit! I turned my head and bit his hand as hard as I could, breaking the skin with my teeth. He yelped and pulled his hand back to smack me upside the head, but then he stopped mid-swing, his face scrunched up in a deep scowl. The kids around us were all gasping with surprise and some started crying like babies pissing their diapers, their chaperones all looking at _me_ with disapproval. That’s when my guard lowered his fist, wiped his bleeding hand on his dark pants and announced to the room, “Now, now, Pets, everything is under control. This one here is only a little too eager to go to his new Master.”

He took something out of his pocket and then I felt a prick on the back of my neck. In seconds, my vision blurred and the sounds of the room dulled to a low drone. I couldn’t string together two sentences to save my life, much less get my mouth working to say a word. I sat slumped against the guard’s leg, mute and confused. After some time—the room was almost emptied of Pets by now—I was dragged onto a brightly lit stage and positioned on a raised dais. A man standing behind a lectern reached down and checked the number on my tag against a list he held in his hand before straightening up and speaking into his microphone, “Lot number CM001. Estimated age: fifteen years. Male. Non-imprinted. Non-pedigreed. Breed type…” the man cleared his throat before continuing, “…breed type: mongrel. No reserve. Do I hear an opening bid?”

The auditorium was dead silent. I couldn’t make out anyone sitting in the seats, my eyes simply wouldn’t focus, but I could still hear. If a pin had dropped, I would have heard it in that deafening silence, as would anyone else, it was so quiet. An eternity seemed to pass before one lone voice sliced through the thick gloom.

“Fifty.”

That voice saying just one simple word…I had only heard it a few times, but that voice was already burned into my soul. Fifty. Iason Mink was buying me for fifty Amoïan dollars, the same amount as the cheapest bottle of stout. “You bastard,” I said to myself, my face hot with the most abject humiliation. “I swear I will make you eat that fifty for the rest of your fucking life!” It didn’t occur to me that I would pay for my own mistakes in far dearer currency.

 


	11. Chapter 11

“You _can’t_ be serious.” 

I leaned back in my chair, stifling the laughter that threatened to erupt from deep within my chest. I didn’t need to turn around to know that Raoul’s face would be stricken with mortification. He had walked into my office while I was enjoying the scene playing out on my video display. For the last half hour, I had been watching the live feed from the holding cell in Mistral Park. I knew that Raoul would be stopping in—we had agreed to meet for a midday meal—but I simply couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen. I was so enthralled by the sight of the mongrel throwing a temper tantrum, beating his fists on the door and cursing up at the security camera even though he must know by now that there was no escape. “This one isn’t going to bore me anytime soon,” I thought to myself. Ahh, the prospect of acquiring a Pet that could actually amuse me sent a thrill up my spine! Raoul, though, was not of the same opinion _at all_. 

“Iason, this is madness,” Raoul insisted. He spun my chair around so I had to face him, gripping my shoulders firmly in his gloved hands as he pleaded his case. “A Pet is supposed to be an accessory flattering its owner, a status symbol that complements one’s rank and reputation. Taking a mongrel as a Pet is like dragging your good name through the mud! It is unacceptable!”

“Now, now, brother,” I soothed, gracing him with a smile. “Since when do I care about status symbols or what others think of me?” 

“ _That’s_ the problem,” Raoul shot back. “You do as you wish, keeping wayward Furniture instead of disposing of them properly, making backroom deals in the Black Market—”

“Are you telling me how to do my job now?” I interrupt. Raoul might be my favorite Blondie, but I wasn’t about to let him question my abilities. I never interfered with his lab experiments involving all sorts of genetic tampering, so it was only right for me to demand the same respect. He created the products that I would sell on the Black Market—be it Pets or drugs or botanical specimens—and the agreement was that we would not interfere with each other’s roles as appointed by Jupiter. 

“Of course not. I wouldn’t dare to do that,” Raoul replied, his tone contrite as he let me pull him onto my lap. “I worry for you, Iason. I’ll be the one to pick up the pieces if things go wrong. You know I can’t bear to see you punished.”

I gave his waist a reassuring squeeze. Raoul had no qualms about conducting unethical tests in his various labs, but when it came to _my_ image and reputation, he walked the straight and narrow, as if keeping me in line was more important than his own well-being. Of course, Raoul had been around longer than I had—Jupiter had created me as the last of the thirteen Blondies currently in existence—and maybe he had witnessed things, disciplinary things, meted out by Jupiter that I had yet to see or experience, but in all my personal dealings with my Master, she had let me choose my own path. As long as Jupiter didn’t tell me “no,” I would continue as I pleased. “Don’t be such a party pooper. Just look at that,” I said, turning us both towards the screen. The mongrel was bashing the food tray on the door, then flinging the badly dented tray across the room. “Have you ever seen anything so _alive_ , so full of _possibility_?”

Raoul’s lovely face crumpled in disgust. “And what if you can’t train that filthy beast? Then what will you do?”

“Oh, I suppose I could tamper with its mind, turn it into an idiotic sex doll and sell it to a brothel.” That seemed to put Raoul more at ease and he rewarded me with a long-suffering sigh and a tender kiss on my cheek. I kissed his cheek in return and patted his thigh. “Let’s go to lunch now, shall we?” As we left my office, I snuck a final glance at the screen and let the vision linger on my brain: pure dark hair, defiant black eyes, such a pleasing sway to his body…Riki the Dark. I couldn’t wait to make him mine. 

*** 

The mongrel was one of the last offerings presented at the Pet auction. This did not surprise me. It had taken much wrangling from Katze to cut through all the red tape and, even then, numerous bribes and favors had been exchanged before ‘CM001’ was finally listed in the catalog. It would have been easier if I had simply demanded it, but both Katze and I agreed that it would be better if my name were not associated in any way with the unprecedented inclusion of a mongrel at a Pet auction. So, I bided my time, enjoying the antics of Riki the Dark in his holding cell until the evening finally arrived and I could purchase the very thing I had been wanting.

He was listless and not his usual fiery self when he was dragged onto the stage and positioned on the dais with his legs spread so all could have a clear view of his assets. Again, this did not surprise me. I had given my consent beforehand that he be subdued using whatever means necessary. I didn’t want him breaking free somehow and escaping before I could even acquire him. Seeing him struggle to sit upright had its own positive points. I knew that it would take a fairly powerful sedative to render him helpless, yet he continued to struggle despite his very obvious delirium. I felt a semblance of pleasure and pride wash over me as my fellow Elites scoffed and laughed around me.

“Look at that _thing_ ,” I heard an Onyx say. “How is that piece of trash even listed in this auction?” An Onyx was beneath my attention, but then I heard him declare, “What laughable fool would pay even one Amoïan dollar for such shit?”

That was all the incentive I needed, not that I needed any incentive. I had decided well beforehand that I would make that mongrel my Pet, but the Onyx’s disdainful opinion made my intentions all the sweeter. I held up my paddle and announced my bid. Fifty Amoïan dollars was a pittance, but it was still more than just one. And I was Iason Mink, the most beloved of Jupiter among all Elites, and I was going to put that Onyx and every other Elite in his fucking place. I was going to shove their self-righteousness down their throats! Most of them paid exorbitant amounts for their Pets, as if the price were a reflection of their own worth in the eyes of society. What slaves they were to their own vanities...and insecurities. I required no one's approval save Jupiter and myself. When the gavel came down and the auctioneer announced “Sold!” I laughed aloud. Beside me, Raoul was too appalled to even move. I stood up, smoothed down my outer robes, and walked out of the auditorium. When I arrived back at my penthouse in Eos Tower, Daryl was there to greet me. 

“Ready the room,” I told my Furniture. “My new Pet will be delivered here tomorrow.”

***

I never miscalculated, but in this instance, even I had to admit that I was off in my assumptions. I chalked it up to my limited experience with mongrels. A month had elapsed since I had taken Riki into my household and no progress had been made. He refused to be dressed or washed or cared for in any way by my Furniture. During the first week, he had bitten and punched Daryl; I saw evidence of this without even questioning my Furniture. Daryl’s face was purple with bruises, his arms covered in teeth marks. I beat my new Pet, caned him while he was chained facedown on the bed, but that only seemed to enrage him further. Strange. Most Pets would cower if a Master barely raised his voice, grovel and beg for forgiveness at the slightest sign of displeasure, but Riki seemed to court it. I arrived home one evening to see the living room sofa overturned, the decorative vases shattered against the wall and Daryl on his hands and knees trying to clean up the mess. I decided enough was enough. I sent my Furniture into his room to recuperate from what I knew was a day of unmitigated stress and, rather than beat my Pet once more, I took a different tact.

“You’re being your usual self, burning anyone who tries to touch you,” I told Riki as I walked over to the bar and poured myself an aperitif. I righted the sofa and sat down on it. “It’s been a month. That should be more than adequate time for you to acclimate yourself but…I see you have awfully thick skin. You’re as stubborn as a brick wall.”

“I can wipe my own ass!" the mongrel shouted. "Tell that kid to get the fuck off of me!”

“I would expect no less from the former leader of Bison,” I replied. The look of shock and humiliation on Riki’s face filled me with satisfaction. He was so easy to dismantle. I chuckled, making sure he could see my enjoyment before I declared, “Still, I am confident that I can train you to be a proper Pet even in your current sorry state.” 

“Find someone else to lick your boots. Don’t you Blondies get to pick and choose whatever trash you want?”

“Oh, it’s much too late for that.” I sipped my pre-dinner cocktail slowly, savoring the heat of my Pet’s anger. “Everyone already knows what garbage I’ve brought into my household. No, I have every intention of whipping you into shape, and then I’ll present you at the next Pet debut. Come, Riki.” I patted my lap. “Sit.”

Of course, he refused, standing with his feet planted and his hands clenched into fists. His defiance only made my artificial blood run hot. He was older than most Pets, his body firm and leanly muscled unlike the soft smooth limbs of the pureblood Pets, and when all that coiled energy was coupled with an expression hardened with fury and cheeks flushed with hatred, it made him so much more beautiful, gloriously beautiful. It made me want to rip out his beating heart and press it to my own cheek, taste the very blood coursing through his veins and know that his will was made of unbending iron. “I told you before not to make me repeat myself,” I threatened even as my amusement curled my lips into a smile. “Sit.” He spat on the floor, then shuffled slowly to the sofa and sat at the other end. Oh ho, this was too good. “No, on my lap,” I ordered.

“Tch.”

I laughed aloud as he finally obeyed with a low growl. I pulled him close to my chest. “What are you afraid of?” Teasing him was so much fun, especially when I could make him blush with one pass of my gloved fingers across his face. “If you can’t do this on your own, then I’ll have Daryl help you out. Is that what you want?”

“You fucking shithead,” Riki snarled. 

Well, he’d called me that a thousand times already and those curses were mere tickles against my skin. He was like no Pet I had ever owned. Most of them required little or no training, but Riki was completely free of any controls or imprinting. He was a lump of clay just waiting to be molded into a perfect form and it gave me pleasure I had never felt before to break him down into the smallest components, shred his pride until he had nothing left to cling to…except me. He couldn’t see it yet, but I would show him that I, his Master, would be his creator and his only reason to live.

“I’ve heard that slum mongrels have no morality, no dignity. Am I wrong? What happened to all that licentiousness, all that filthy charisma you showed me when you invited me to that love hotel? Are you playing the innocent virgin now? I won’t always be this patient.”

“I’m not a slut,” Riki protested. “I’m no nympho either!”

I rested my hand on his groin and felt his cock twitch. Now we were getting somewhere. “A Pet’s coupling is a public affair,” I instructed. “A Pet is meant to perform for the enjoyment of its Master.” Training him to masturbate for me—there was no act more basic for a Pet—was still an uphill battle. I had to order him repeatedly to spread his legs so I could see clearly his arousal. Oftentimes, he would defy me altogether and then I’d have to call my Furniture and, together, we would train my Pet. I would hold Riki firmly in my arms as Daryl fellated him. At times, I wondered if Riki would ever come around, but tonight he was responding well despite his foul words.

“So, you Elites are just a bunch of sick perverts? How pathetic!”

Riki was squirming in my lap now as I continued to stroke his burgeoning cock. No matter what nonsense tumbled from his degenerate mouth, his body was honest in ways no other Pet had been for me. This mongrel was beyond adorable; he was naked despite all his efforts to hide the truth of his desire. “The party is in two months,” I told him, “and I will teach you proper manners.”

“Good fucking luck,” Riki said, his hips grinding into my touch. “Slum mongrels are all dirty wild dogs, aren’t they?”

“Even a wild dog like you can be tamed. I’m going to prove it to myself.” I stroked Riki through his trousers and felt him convulse against me, his body trembling for more. “When I show you off at the party, I won’t have you shame me. You are my Pet, Riki. You are Iason Mink’s Pet, and I will have your body remember that.”

I unzipped his trousers and freed his erection. He was leaking from the tip, on the brink of orgasm and all it took was seven firm strokes and he was ejaculating into my gloved fist. I hadn’t even caressed his nipples for him to reach climax, he was so sensitive to my touch. What a diamond in the rough, my Riki. I carried him into his room and called for Daryl to undress him. I would bring him to orgasm many more times before I was done with him for the night. I would show all my brethren who were talking behind my back that I would not fail in my endeavor. I would prove them all wrong—even Raoul who disapproved of my decision to take a mongrel as a Pet—that Iason Mink could overcome any obstacle. I could take the dirtiest lump of coal and make it shine like the most precious gem.

 


	12. Chapter 12

What did it mean to be a Pet owned by the most powerful Blondie in Tanagura?

It meant air that didn’t smell like rotten eggs or shit or piss, a bed with clean silken sheets and a mattress so thick and fluffy it felt like I was floating on a cloud. It meant filtered water as clear as the glass that held it, food that hadn’t turned, and meat… _real_ meat, not the fake stuff made of salt, dye, and sawdust.

I was living in Eos Tower, so high up in the sky that I could see everything spread out down below: Midas, Ceres, even Dana Bahn way off in the distance. On a clear night, it felt like I could touch the stars just by reaching out my hand. I had never imagined such luxury even when prowling the most exclusive shopping districts of Flare, not even in Apatia, where the wealthiest citizens rented the best condos. I was living in the penthouse owned by Iason Mink, the most distinguished Blondie in all of Tanagura—probably all of Amoï— and its most perverted weirdo.

Was it good? Was it beautiful? To live in such splendor…was it everything I had ever hoped for? Back in Ceres before all of this happened, I would have said, “Fuck, yeah, it’s a dream come true.”

I wish I could kill myself for such stupidity. I wish I could kill myself for being such a fool. “So, why don’t you?” you ask. I’ll tell you why. My wrists and ankles are kept shackled night and day. I am freed only to eat and shit and piss and be bathed by a boy named Daryl. He is Iason Mink’s Furniture and my fucking babysitter. He treats me as if I’m some helpless snot-nosed brat who can’t wipe his own ass. I kid you not. Daryl _has_ wiped my ass, held my dick so I can piss into the toilet when I could barely stand on my own two feet after being fucked to shreds by my Master.

Where do I even start? So much of what happened in those early days is a blur. Sometimes it feels like an unending nightmare. If only it were _just_ a nightmare. If it were, then at least I would have the hope to wake up one day and find myself back in my old dumpy apartment still working for Katze, or maybe I’d wake up and I’d be in bed with Guy, his arms around me, his breath on my forehead as he slept. I would snuggle closer to him, press my nose against his bare chest and…cry tears of relief…of happiness. 

I had wanted more, though. I was greedy for a better life and so I was punished. That’s what I told myself to make the days and nights bearable. I was in a prison; I was a toy, a plaything at the mercy of a perverted android. At first, I fought back because any mongrel worth his salt wouldn’t go down without a fight. I did everything I could to piss off that Blondie because I figured that was the only way to make him want to get rid of me. I didn’t care how he did it. He could beat me to death and that would be okay because then I’d be free of him at least. But he didn’t. Oh, he beat me alright, but he didn’t try to kill me. No, he always made sure that Daryl would tend to any wounds. That sick bastard was going to keep me alive just so he could torture me.

I don’t know how much time passed. He kept threatening to show me off at some ‘Pet soiree’ or whatever the fuck he called it. I didn’t even know what it meant but I was pretty sure it was going to be a major disaster. He told me he was going to ‘train’ me. Holy fucking hell, even the sleaziest scumbags in Ceres didn’t do the things he did to me. He’d chain me up, then order me to jack off in front of him while he sat in a chair watching me.

“Open your legs,” he’d say. “Let me see you.” 

If I refused, he’d call Daryl into the room and order him to blow me. If that didn’t get me hard, then he’d shove a gloved finger up my ass and…somehow or other he’d find that spot inside me that drove me crazy. He’d rub and pinch my nipples until I was moaning like a slut. I swear, I wanted to die. The things he did to me…it felt so good and horrible at the same time. Can you even understand? Can you imagine what it was to be Iason Mink’s Pet? I had never known such humiliation, such shame. I had never known anything that felt so amazing either. 

I felt reality slip away from me. Right before Iason brought me to my first ‘Pet soiree,’ he did something he had never done before. He fucked me himself. In all my interactions with him, he had never even attempted to do this, but one night, he told me that it was his right as my Master to take me himself. I didn’t know any better. I assumed that all Blondies did whatever they wanted. I had never seen him naked either and I admit that I was more than a little curious. As much as I hated him, I couldn’t deny that he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. 

He chained me to the bed, as usual, then he undressed. I don’t know why, but I was surprised to see that he looked just like a human: he had nipples and a cock and balls. His skin, though, was completely hairless, so white and smooth and perfect, and when he lay on top of me, his body felt cool to the touch. It was the first time I had felt his skin on my own and, despite all my anger and disgust, I wanted him. I wanted him to destroy me, hurt me, make me cry. He had taken everything from me already: my life in Ceres, Guy, my freedom. What was left but my pride for him to take as well?

It hurt more than anything I had ever known. Iason was huge, his cock. Guy wasn’t small by any standards, but Guy always took his time with me. He was patient and considerate, kind and loving. Iason was Iason. He did what he wanted, when he wanted, how he wanted. He shoved himself into me and then fucked me without mercy. It went on forever. By the end, when Iason finally tired of me, I was bleeding and completely broken. Literally. I felt like every bone in my body was in pieces. I couldn’t even leave the bed, couldn’t get up to take a piss. Daryl had to clean me up, then hold my dick so I could pee into a bowl. For the next few days, he had to help me walk to the bathroom so he could bathe me. It was days after that before I could take a shit without being in agony. Do you understand now?

I was taken to the ‘Pet soiree’ eventually. All the other Pets hated me instantly. They sneered at me, called me names, told me I stunk up the whole place with my slum odor. One of the Pets, some pampered shithead named Enif, actually slapped me. It was laughable and I told him so.

“That’s not how you hit someone,” I said. “You do it like _this_."

I punched him in the face and he went down like a pussy, crying and moaning to his Master for help. I figured Iason would beat the crap out of me but, to my shock, he told Enif’s Master that whoever starts a fight is the one at fault. Was that weirdo actually defending me? All the way back to Eos Tower I was on pins and needles. I knew I was out of line when I hit that idiot Pet, and I knew that Iason was all into discipline, but when we got back to the penthouse, Iason didn’t cane me. He put me to bed and laid down beside me in his clothes. I didn’t know what to think except that he smelled so good and that I hated him for it. Why did he have to smell so good? Then, he kissed me. He had never kissed me before. It took me by surprise. Like his skin, his lips felt cool against my own. It made me shiver. It made me hate him so much it felt like my heart would explode. 

“Don’t do this to me,” I thought. Then, “Do it more.” 

But he didn’t. He gave me that one kiss—a kiss that left me aching for release, for a warm body, for someone to hold me and tell me that my life wasn’t totally fucked beyond repair—and then he left me in darkness.

“Guy,” I sobbed into my pillow, “where are you? Are you okay? It’s so cold here. I’m all alone. Guy. I miss you so much.”


	13. Chapter 13

Time was running short, or so I told myself. After nearly three months, Riki had only become more insolent, more obstinate. Even as his body grew increasingly sensitive and responsive to my touch, his attitude continued to harden. He defied my commands, obeying only when beaten or chained into submission. He reveled in his scorn and spite, wore it like a jeweled crown fit for a mad king and, oh, he was _glorious_ in his fury. Unfortunately, my brothers would not view it that way; they didn’t see what I saw. I would be bringing him to his first public showing in a little over a week and I would _not_ be shamed by him, my beautiful Riki. If he would not bend, then I would break him instead for his own good. 

The memory of that encounter in the love hotel had settled in my mind. I recalled it frequently, replayed it over and over like one reads a favorite poem. I could see it all very clearly, the way his dark eyes had beckoned like a light flashing in the darkness, the way his slender hips had arched into my hand, the way his whole body had shook and shivered in my embrace. Where that boy had gone was anyone’s guess, but I would find him again. I had to. I was Iason Mink. That was reason enough.

That night in the hotel, he had asked me why I didn’t undress before I had my way with him. Such a silly, ignorant question! Perhaps he had truly believed that he was repaying some debt by selling his body—as if a mongrel could _ever_ repay a debt to a Blondie in such a depraved manner—but for me, it was mere curiosity, a disciplinary action that I had been willing to forgo if not for his arrogant insistence. A Blondie undressing in order to correct a Pet’s errant behavior was a preposterous notion. And yet, with Riki determined to be my Pet-Who-Would-Not-Be-Trained, I found myself wondering, “Why not? All else has failed. Why not do the unthinkable?” 

He had been so eager for me to copulate with him in that love hotel…perhaps I should, even if it meant debasing myself. Perhaps that was the only way to train a slum mongrel. They came from filth, after all, and maybe filthy acts were the only things they understood. He had been the leader of Bison, nothing more than a pack of wild dogs, but he was their alpha nonetheless. According to the literature available on the behavior of mongrels, an alpha will only submit to an even more dominant alpha, one that is bigger, stronger, more willful. 

Out of desperation, I downloaded the latest Pet ownership manual, written by none other than my dear Raoul Am. After consulting it, I was certain that I had employed all the standard methods, followed the established protocols, but to no avail. Truth be told, I’d never had to train a Pet before. All the ones I had owned in the past had come into my household fully imprinted and ready to show and breed. Riki was the first Pet who had ever disobeyed my orders. He was also the first Pet who actually…excited me. He was the lowest form of human, yet no Academy engineered Pet of the purest blood came close to him in unadulterated beauty, none of them possessed even an iota of the fire and spirit that burned so brightly in his obsidian eyes. He was my Riki, my dazzling, demon Pet, and I would make him know his Master even if I had to pound it into the very marrow of his bones.

***

Looking back on it, I realize that my desire to not have Riki embarrass me at his ‘debut’ was just an excuse for me to satiate a craving that had been building inside me since that night in the love hotel. He had awakened something in me that I didn’t understand at the time. It was something so foreign, so bizarre…a feeling that I had never experienced before, one that would haunt me day and night once he was my Pet in Eos Tower. It was like an itch I couldn’t scratch, an itch right beneath my skin, if only I could find it. There was no relief from this craving, this itch. Every time I thought of Riki, it worsened, until I thought I would go mad. 

Of course, I showed none of this weakness to my peers, and certainly not to my Pet. In front of Riki, I maintained my honorable, discreet demeanor. I spoke coldly, even cruelly to him, because that is what a Master did if a Pet misbehaved. It was what was expected. But each time he fought me—each time he shouted vulgar words and thrashed about on the bed, pulling on the chains until his wrists and ankles were rubbed raw—it only made me want to feel him against me, right up against my bare skin. I wanted to know him in every way possible, touch him without my gloves. I wanted to tear down the barrier between us.

So, one night when he had been particularly bratty, I put Riki over my lap and spanked him, softly at first, and then more firmly when he swore a blue streak at me. He called me obscene names, accused me of the most heinous perversions, and it was like a symphony composed by Jupiter herself. I knew then that I would show him everything. To be naked with a lowly mongrel Pet was pure insanity, but by then I was out of my mind with the need to drive myself into him. I had never wanted this before, but I had never owned such a force of nature either. I was helpless before his trembling flesh.

Though we Elites are sterile, Jupiter fashioned us in a human mould, with human responses to exterior stimuli. I had enjoyed illicit pleasures with Raoul through the years, but that paled in comparison to what I was feeling with my Pet. There was a storm inside me, a tornado of uncontrollable hunger, and I would let it loose. I chained his wrists to the headboard, leaving his legs free for me to manipulate, then I calmly undressed even as my artificial heart threatened to beat right out of my chest. What was I doing? What crime was I going to commit against Jupiter and everything that I had been taught? The look of shock and fear on his face made me throw all caution to the wind. He was so beautiful, my Riki, so astonishingly _honest_ when I gripped his ankles and thrust myself deep inside him. His cries, his tears…I was dragging myself through the mud, defiling myself in a way no Blondie would ever dare to do…but his cries, his tears would wash me clean.

Afterwards, when I saw the blood on the sheets, I called for my Furniture to clean him up. Then I went to my room and lay down on my own unsoiled bed. My mind was a blank. It was strange to be devoid of thoughts. I closed my eyes and put myself to sleep mode. Six hours later, I awoke refreshed and sane. I went to my office and conducted my usual business as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. All was right again. A week passed and then I took Riki to his coming-out reception. All my fellow Elites were there. They were curious to see if Iason Mink was able to whip a slum mongrel into a form suitable for a Blondie’s Pet. Riki did not disappoint. He promptly got into a fight with one of the most expensive Pets acquired at auction to date, a handsome but idiotic Pet named Enif. This stupid Enif slapped my Riki after an angry exchange of words between them and I almost burst into laughter because I knew what my Pet was capable of doing. Ah, Riki! My Pet landed a punch squarely on the jaw of Enif and it took all my self control to refrain from leaping up and clapping and shouting “Bravo!” I was so proud of him. He had strength; he was fearless in the face of disapproval. It gave me courage when I didn’t even know I needed it.

All the way back to the penthouse he was quiet and subdued. I assumed he was expecting me to beat him for acting out against another Pet. How adorable! Riki was learning and it made my whole body thrum with joy. I undressed him and then I put him to bed myself instead of calling for my Furniture to perform such a mundane task. Riki was being so contrite I decided to leave him unchained for once. I kissed him goodnight, just one chaste kiss even though I wanted so badly to ravish his sweet lips. Though he had shown me a glimmer of obedience, I knew he was far from tame and, like all wild animals, I knew better than to touch him too often and too freely. I would have to proceed slowly and with discernment if I wished to avoid getting bitten. What a challenge he was! How had I lived before this, how had I endured the boredom? I would never be bored again. As long as I had Riki, my life would be worth living. 

***

“That was quite a scene,” Raoul commented dryly when I saw him a month after Riki’s public debut. “All of Tanagura is full of gossip. Are you satisfied now, to have your good name tarnished by that piece of trash?”

Yes, that is how my brother greeted me as we began a round of pool in the club room reserved for Blondies in Eos Tower. His words were harsh and likely true, but I was unconcerned. I had been away on a series of diplomatic missions off-world and had just returned the day before. It had been a tedious trip full of endless meetings; hours upon hours had been spent negotiating trade agreements and it had been particularly irritating because those were hours I could have spent playing with my Pet instead. I suppose the talks would have concluded sooner had I not been so distracted with thoughts of Riki’s supple flesh beneath my bare fingertips, but that couldn’t be helped. My head was in a cloud, as they say. I was walking on sunshine. Or perhaps I had merely lost my mind.

As soon as I arrived back home, I went straight to Riki’s room. I found him in the en suite shower pleasuring himself and the sight of him stroking his erect member filled me with satisfaction. “He’s coming around at last,” I thought to myself. “He’s finally learning to be a proper Pet.” What a good boy he was! I silently watched from the doorway, waited until he brought himself to climax before taking a towel off the rack and holding it open for him. Of course, he was shocked and furious to see me standing in the bathroom. Unlike an ordinary Pet who would have immediately assumed a submissive position upon seeing its Master, perhaps fallen on its hands and knees to kiss my boots, he grabbed the towel in a huff and turned his back on me. I suspect his cheeks were flushed more from shame than from the hot shower. There was plenty for me to teach him yet.

There was more for me to learn as well. Time away from Tanagura, with its incessant gossip circulating among my brothers about my recent actions, had given me some much needed distance, a different perspective from which to view my current dilemma with Riki. I realized I may have gone too far, been too abrupt in my attempt at a more unorthodox training technique. Well, ‘unorthodox’ might be too forgiving a word, but my intention was pure. As I said, it’s all a matter of perspective. Riki was a mongrel, and like all mongrels, according to scientific research available in the database, it was in his nature to be wary, suspicious, untrusting of others. It was also in his nature to be crass, crude, and given to fits of violence. Humans, mongrels especially, were prone to be irrational when threatened or in an unfamiliar environment. My assumption that he would respond to training if a firm hand was applied had proven incorrect. My subsequent foray into using his own ‘language’ to communicate with him—that is, by engaging in the lowest form of sexual activity like a debauched mongrel would—had been equally non-productive, perhaps even detrimental. I had not injured him beyond repair, but he had suffered wounds nonetheless and that was never my goal.

Humans are weak and fragile compared to Jupiter’s creation and Riki’s injuries were a reminder to me of that fact. I had to be more conscientious. Having never touched any of my former Pets, I had no awareness of my strength. Some of my Elite brothers had been known to beat a Pet to death, Furniture too, but I could see now that those incidents could easily have been accidental. The Elites, Blondies in particular, are characterized by their calm, rational temperaments. Even when disposing of a Pet or Furniture for good reason, we do it without any of the emotional turmoil that humans display so readily. Riki was high-strung and foul-tempered and would react with violence if startled. I had startled him that night that I copulated with him, but the violence, inadvertent as it was, had been inflicted by me; thus, it was my mistake to correct.

It was a simple fix, really, mere adjustments to be made on my part. Number one: I needed to approach him without appearing as an overt threat. Number two: I needed to reduce the size of my appendage. Pets copulated with other Pets. The size difference among them was negligible in almost every case; proper breeding and genetic selection ensured consistency and quality. Raoul could talk for hours about the importance of standardization, but the bottom line was that even with the slight variations that occur naturally, a stud animal was never so overly endowed that he could injure a sex or breeding partner. This was something that I had never bothered to consider until I saw that I had unintentionally left my Pet in a bad way. Of course, it should have never happened in the first place—Jupiter explicitly prohibited intercourse between Blondie's and their Pets—but what’s done is done, and I had every intention of doing it again, only I would do it right the next time. I would show him what kind of Master I was, one who could tread in filth and remain above it all. I could copulate with a mongrel and raise him up above the best that the Academy had to offer. I would show all of Tanagura that Iason Mink was capable of anything.

 


	14. Chapter 14

I swear that blond freak show was obsessed with my nipples. I mean, what the fuck was up with that? Guy would play with mine once in a while if he wanted to take things slow, but Iason wouldn’t leave them alone. I should have seen it coming. Iason Mink is totally weird, but he’s also kind of predictable when it comes to all the kinky shit he likes to do in bed. He’d played with my nips that time we hooked up at that love hotel like they were _interesting_ or something; back then, I didn’t even know that having them touched could feel so good. Now, after six months of imprisonment in Eos Tower, all Iason has to do is rub them between his thumb and forefinger and I’m shooting my load into his other hand. He calls my nipples my “good spots.” I have another “good spot” elsewhere on my body, that place inside me that he always seems to find with his finger, with his cock, when he wants to torture me in the best way. It’s so fucking humiliating. It makes me know how far I’ve fallen. 

When I first came to live with him, he told me, “You are my Pet, Riki. You are Iason Mink’s Pet and I’ll have your body remember it.”

Each of those words was like a punch in the face, an insult to my pride. I didn’t care who he was, _I_ was the leader of Bison, or _was_ at least. I didn’t bow down to anyone, be it fellow mongrel or Elite Blondie. How dare he call me a freaking _Pet_. I was no one’s Pet, least of all his. But no matter how many times I told him off, he’d stand there like a brick wall, as if I were some pathetic snot-nosed brat rather than the gang boss who had ruled over the free fire zone of Ceres. Sometimes he’d narrow his blue eyes to a slit and smirk, sometimes he’d laugh outright at me before proceeding with my ‘training.’

At first, he’d just beat me with a cane while my arms were chained. The more he did it, the more I resisted. It was the only thing I _could_ do; I was powerless otherwise. He wasn’t just bigger and taller than me, he was so much physically stronger, too. As an android, he could easily crush my skull in his hands if he wanted to. I don’t know…maybe in the back of my mind I was hoping he’d do just that. At least it would put an end to the mess I had gotten myself into. When he actually fucked me for the first time, though, something happened to me. I felt fear. Up until then, despite all the shit he was putting me through—the ‘disciplining’ and the ‘training’ and even all the pervy stuff with the Furniture—I wasn’t afraid of him. I didn’t think he’d really try to kill me, but as I lay shackled on the bed while he fucked into me, I thought to myself, “I’m going to die. I’m really going to die from this.”

The thing was, I wasn’t ready to die. At that moment, I didn’t _want_ to die anymore. Maybe it’s because my choice was being taken away from me; I couldn’t stand to think that my life would be snuffed out in a way that was completely out of my control. My years in Ceres had taught me that life was held by the thinnest thread, especially for a gang leader, but I had always envisioned my own death as something that happened on my own terms, maybe in a knife fight with another opponent, or by my own hand for whatever reason, but at least it would be honorable, it wouldn’t be like _this_ —naked under a Blondie who was murdering me with his massive cock. That night, I saw Iason for what he was: a machine with no soul. He wasn’t just full of himself and domineering, he was something beyond redemption. There was no bargaining with him. He would do as he liked and I was up shit’s creek without a fucking paddle heading straight to hell.

Strangely enough, he got weirder. Or maybe ‘unpredictable’ is a better word. At my so-called Pet ‘debut,’ I beat up that dumbass Enif for slapping me, but Iason was actually nice to me afterwards. He seemed almost protective of me in front of the other Elites, and then he didn’t cane me or fuck me in bed later. In fact, he didn’t lay a hand on me at all. Instead, he disappeared completely for a while; Daryl told me ‘Lord Mink’ was off-world on a business trip when I finally bothered to ask him. That Furniture always acted like Iason was the best thing since sliced bread, even though the kid had eyes and could see what a freaking monster he was. Iason made him blow me, for fuck’s sake, and yet Daryl still referred to that pervert as ‘Master’ and ‘Lord’ like he meant it. Is it any wonder I wanted to kick the shit out of the Furniture? Still, with Iason away, Daryl was my only companion in the penthouse and the only person I could talk to. I was so bored out of my skull I actually asked him to play cards with me. He said he would if I promised not to punch him. I guess he wasn’t a bad person even if he followed Iason’s orders like a robot, and playing cards with the Furniture was better than just staring at the ceiling all day long. I didn’t like to look out the windows. I didn’t want to know what I was missing.

***

When Iason came back weeks later, he caught me jacking off in the shower. All his freakish ‘training’ had turned me into a horny slut, but the need to ‘relieve’ myself was a problem because I had no privacy. Daryl kept close watch over me and the bathroom was the only place where I felt relatively safe from his prying eyes. Of course, he’d seen my dick and everything else a thousand times by now, but can’t a guy just choke his chicken in peace? I didn’t hear Iason come in over the sound of the water running. Besides, I was too busy cumming to notice that someone was standing in the doorway. When I turned off the hot water tap and slid open the glass door, he was waiting in the room with a towel held open for me. Goddamn it, could my life get any worse? Yes, of course it could.

“What a good Pet you’re becoming,” he said with a sarcastic smile. 

“Fuck you.” I grabbed the towel out of his hands, annoyed that he was teasing me, and stomped into my bedroom drying my hair so hard my scalp hurt.

“There’s no shame in pleasuring yourself,” Iason told me in his usual soft murmur. The hint of smugness rang loud and clear though. “It’s a Pet’s duty to—”

I cut him short, snarling, “Don’t tell me what to do. And don’t call me your fucking Pet. I’m no one’s Pet.”

“Oh?” Iason sat down on my bed and calmly folded his gloved hands on his lap. He watched me dry myself while I glared back at him, his piercing eyes roaming over my naked body as if he were exposing my soul. Then he held out one hand to me and asked, though it was really a command, “Let’s try again, shall we?”

Those words made me stiffen, not just my spine, but my arms and legs, too. The hairs rose on my entire body, my balls twitched in their sac, my cock which had just been stroked to completion began plumping shamelessly once more. I bit down on my bottom lip so hard I could taste iron, hoping the pain would bring me back to sanity, but it was no good. I was breathing hard, my chest heaving even though I was just standing there like a statue. I heard a loud roaring in my ears. It took me a moment to realize it was the sound of my own blood pumping in my veins, my heart pounding like a drum.

“Come, Riki,” came Iason’s low, soft voice. “Come to your Master.” 

“No, no, no!” I screamed back, but the words never left my throat. Instead, I found myself dropping the towel, then slowly moving towards his outstretched arms until I was held firmly in his embrace. He drew me onto his lap and pressed his cool lips to mine. I could smell the clean scent of his artificial skin, and then I felt his tongue slip into my mouth. It was surprisingly warm and wet, and it curled against my own until I was sucking down on it, moaning and desperate for him. His gloved hands were on me and I reached for them, tugging at them and rasping, “Take them off.” His gloves were made of the softest material, but I wanted to feel his skin on my own. What was wrong with me? How could I be such a cock hungry whore? But fuck it all to hell…I was aching for him. “Iason…take it all off.”

He chuckled under his breath and it pissed me off to see the satisfaction on his face. He was winning and I was losing. My pride had gone AWOL and taken my mind with it, but that did nothing to change the fact that I wanted him…on me, in me. I wanted his cock so bad, even though he had torn me apart before, I still wanted his cock moving inside me. I lay on the bed, my limbs free to touch myself, which I did shamelessly while he disrobed. Nothing could prepare me for the shock of seeing him naked. Why? Hadn’t I seen him naked before? It was his cock. It stood engorged and gloriously erect, but it was markedly smaller than the horse dick he had wielded before. It was still large by human standards, but no longer a lethal weapon of destruction.

“How come…?” I immediately grasped his boner as soon as he lay down beside me. It was thick and heavy and rigid in my hand, more than substantial, but it made me salivate rather than recoil in terror as it did before. “Why is it smaller?”

Iason rested his hand over mine and stroked up the long shaft. “I thought this size might be more pleasing to you. You had difficulty accommodating me before, did you not?” 

I gaped at him in surprise, the puzzle piece slowly fitting into place, then I half-shrieked, “You can change the size of your dick?”

“Of course,” Iason said nonchalantly. “I can change the length and color of my hair as well. Would you like to see?”

Before I could answer, the long blond strands had retracted into his skull and darkened to a chestnut brown color, just like that! Now my mouth was really hanging open. Holy shit! What else could this freak do? A murky memory flashed across my mind for a second, a memory from when I was working for Katze as a courier. I had been sent to one of the warehouses to retrieve a package and I happened upon Katze speaking with a tall man dressed in an ordinary suit. I had been unable to see the man’s face since his back was turned to me and the corridor was dimly lit, but he had short brown hair, just like Iason did right now. The recollection filled me with unease; it made me wonder if that man had been Iason sporting a different hairstyle and clothing. If it was him, then what did it mean that he was in disguise and speaking with Katze? What else didn’t I know about Iason, about Katze, about my own fucking life? How stupid was I?

My questions were swept aside, though, as Iason willed his hair back to its usual appearance and began kissing me again, deep kisses that sent all my thoughts flying out of my head. I carded my hands through his silken hair, wound the strands around my fingers as he moved his mouth down my body, licking and sucking at my neck, then my nipples, until he took my leaking cock into his mouth and swallowed me down into his throat. I felt his hand gripping the base of my dick, then twisting up the shaft as he swirled his tongue around my crown, laving at the slit before taking me into his mouth again. I arched my back and came. I think I screamed loud enough to wake the dead but I didn’t care, it felt so good.

He gave me a few minutes to catch my breath as he knelt between my thighs and stroked his own cock, bringing a clear liquid to the tip and onto his fingers. It wasn’t cum, unless androids had clear jizz, and he gave no indication that he was anywhere near climax. “Open your legs wider.”

I didn’t hesitate. I pulled my knees up to my chest and he fingered my hole, just rubbing lightly at my entrance at first, and then pushing inside me. I closed my eyes and clamped my jaws shut to keep from crying out. He was twisting his fingers, moving them slowly in and out of me, and then curling them right up against my “good spot.” My mouth opened and I let loose the most wanton groan despite all my efforts to keep quiet. “Don’t!” I gritted out, my teeth clenched together once more.

“Don’t what?” Iason teased. 

I could hear the triumph in his voice. He knew he had me completely in his thrall and all I could do was writhe on his hand as my cock stood at attention. “Don’t stop…” I begged. The admission of my desire was horrifying. It was proof of my own complicity—wasn’t I asking for it?—but it was out of my mouth and too late to take back. My body was a traitor, such a fucking traitor!

“You are my Pet and I am your Master,” Iason repeated. It was his mantra, the words he said over and over again to make me know my place. “You belong to me.”

His fingers slipped out and then I felt it, the blunt head of his cock pressing at my entrance, pushing in and opening me up. I gripped the sheets and readied myself for the pain. It hurt, it did, it really did, but then…it didn’t. He was kissing me again, kissing my face, my chest, my shoulder, my neck, light kisses that felt like butterfly wings brushing against my skin. Then he kissed my lips, sliding his tongue into my mouth at the same moment that he sank his cock deep inside me. I wrapped my legs around his waist, my arms around his ribs, and held on tightly as he rocked into me. He was the tide lapping at the shore of my body—steady, rhythmic—sending wave upon wave of pleasure through me, from my toes to the top of my head. I came again, spilling what little seed I had left over my stomach, but Iason didn’t stop. He kept thrusting slowly, smearing my cum onto his own belly and chest, telling me in that hypnotic voice of his, “You’re mine, Riki, you are my Pet.”

I lay limp beneath him, his words like knives stabbing me in the heart, his body like a drug inside me. In the morning…in the morning I’d get my shit together, put on my game face and claw my way out of this pit I had dug for myself, but right now, I was no longer Riki the Dark. I was Iason Mink’s Pet. I was someone I didn’t even know.

 


	15. Chapter 15

I had served as Furniture in Iason Mink’s household for a year and a half before Riki arrived…and all hell broke loose. Up until then, my life in Eos Tower had been busy, peaceful, orderly. Master Iason was stern but clear in his expectations and not unkind. Compared to many of the other Elites, who were almost too enthusiastic in their social climbing and jockeying for status among their own ranks, Lord Mink might appear rather cold and indifferent, but in private he always displayed a thoughtfulness that the others lacked. If he was satisfied with something I had done—if I had prepared a particularly interesting meal, for example—he would reward me with a trinket or a new outfit, as if he actually took the time to _consider_ me.

“Furniture should be pleasing to the eye,” he would tell me by way of explanation. And sometimes he would even say, “Well done.” 

Lest you think I’m a vain idiot, I knew full well that Masters gave their Pets trinkets and new outfits all the time, and I wasn’t so foolish as to interpret his words as praise. Imagine! A Blondie paying a lowly piece of Furniture a compliment! Ha! But those gestures of kindness, however meaningless they were to my Master, were still something I hoarded in the same way the Pets hoarded their Aurora coins; to know that I had performed up to his standards meant that I was fulfilling my purpose, that I was useful. I wanted him to continue telling me “well done” and thinking that I looked nice. Yes, Master Iason liked nice things, tasteful things, but he didn’t flaunt his wealth like others and his penthouse, while appointed with the highest quality this or that, was not ostentatious. He _did_ like to splurge on good wine, though, and often invited his fellow Blondie, Raoul Am, to sample vintages with him.

Like Lord Am, my Master kept only Academy-bred Pets of the finest pedigree, a whole series of them in fact. He would acquire one at auction and then send it to the Pet soirees practically every night of the week as proof of its quality. After a month or so, he would tire of it and sell it off without even exercising his right to breed them; then he would acquire a new one and do the same all over again. He showed no interest in the Pets themselves, never laid a gloved hand on them, hardly ever bothered to speak or look at them, but he _was_ turning a tidy profit. Any Pet that could claim Iason Mink as its previous owner was highly desirable and sought after by other Elites, by collectors, by proprietors of exclusive brothels, even ones off-world, such was Lord Mink’s reputation. Some of his peers accused him of being fickle, but who could blame him for taking advantage of the resale value of his Pets? Master Iason was the wealthiest Blondie in Tanagura because he knew how to play the market. Well, he _ran_ the Black Market, too.

A year or so into my tenure and for no apparent reason, my Master stopped replacing his Pets, opting to keep none at all for a good four months. His closest colleague, Lord Am, “badgered him” (as Lord Mink put it) to take another Pet, but my Master was deaf to his pleas. I began to worry for my own security. A Furniture’s main duties are to run the household of its Master and tend to his Pet; without a Pet, there was little for me to do. Iason Mink was a very busy Blondie with heavy responsibilities in Tanagura and was seldom home except to sleep in his private quarters, or take a light breakfast in the morning. If there was no work-related reception to attend in the evening, then he would dine out with one of his peers, or he was gone altogether on a business trip for days or weeks at a time.

During those months without a Pet, Lord Am often took meals, or drinks at least, at the penthouse with my Master. I suspect he was inviting himself over in order to scold my Master, but I was grateful for Lord Am’s presence. Preparing dinner gave me something to do and I secretly welcomed his nagging. Perhaps it was self-serving on his part—Lord Am was the head of the Academy Pet breeding program, after all—but I was also in agreement with him, which was probably self-serving on _my_ part. My Master’s previous Furniture had been dismissed under strange circumstances and I didn’t want my own imposed idleness to give him reason to send me away also. I was quite naïve back then. 

Iason was exacting in his standards but that was only right. My Master expected the best because he _was_ the best. Why should he settle for less? Why indeed? When the rumors first circulated that Lord Mink was considering a _mongrel_ for a Pet, I ignored it. It was too ludicrous to take seriously and I knew better. Furniture often spent their free time gossiping amongst themselves. It was our only form of entertainment, to be honest. Pets are by nature extremely narcissistic, demanding and as helpless as babies, and minding them was a round-the-clock duty. It was a Furniture’s responsibility to see to all their needs, and this often meant escorting the newer Pets to the salon for group socialization. The Furniture would congregate in the spacious lounge located inside the salon’s foyer until the Pets were ready to be taken back home. That was pretty much Gossip Central for us. Furniture were, well, furniture. We served a purpose in the same way that a table or a bed served a purpose. We were always present but invisible at the same time. Because of our purely utilitarian function, our Masters spoke freely in our presence, like one would converse in front of a chair, and that meant that there was always an endless river of gossip flowing wherever Furniture were gathered. While we knew to keep our mouths shut at home—and our eyes and ears open instead—once we were among our own kind all that dirt got spilled without shame.

“Did you hear that Lord So-and-So spent such-and-such on whatever?” “Did you know that the Ambassador to wherever was snubbed by Lord So-and-So at that party last week?” And so each Furniture would throw his two cents into the pot, hoping that his tidbit was juicy enough to provoke a collective gasp of surprise or dismay. “Did you hear that a mongrel from Ceres is being offered at the upcoming Pet auction?” “Did you know that Lord Mink is the one behind it all?” 

I myself did not like to gossip, even if I always listened. Iason Mink was powerful. He was revered by many, feared by even more, and I can wholeheartedly say that he elicited both contradictory feelings in me. Gossiping about him was out of the question. He only punished me a few times, and only when I was first brought into his household and was unfamiliar with his way of doing things, but those few times were enough to last me the rest of my life. The beatings weren’t meted out of cruelty, but out of an expectation that things be perfect. So, imagine my shock when those ridiculous rumors proved to be true! What could be _less_ perfect than a Ceres mongrel, a slum dog with unknown paternity? Riki had been raised in Guardian like I was, and that meant that our mothers had given us up as infants. It meant, as par for the course, that no father was named on the birth certificate. It was unheard of for a Blondie, or anyone else for that matter, to purchase a Pet with no papers to prove its pedigree. I couldn’t even begin to fathom what my Master was thinking.

And then Iason Mink’s newest Pet was delivered to the penthouse. My boring routine was thrown into chaos. My life, which had been as smooth and flat as the surface of a mirror, was completely shattered by the asteroid storm called Riki the Dark. From the very moment he was led into the penthouse still in shackles—and _muzzled!—_ I knew this was no ordinary Pet. To say he was a handful didn’t even begin to describe the sheer energy it took to keep him under control. It was like trying to bottle lightning, as the saying goes. Gone were my days of peaceful solitude. I had never felt so afraid for my life and yet so alive.

***

During the very first week, the new Pet bit, punched, and kicked me. He bloodied my lip when he struck me with the plate on which I served his food. Dressing and bathing him was nearly impossible, something I only managed to do after my Master gave me a tasteless, colorless sedative to mix into Riki’s drink. That made him groggy enough for me to put him in the bath and wash his unruly hair, scrub him down so that he was clean. During the day when Iason was at work, it was solely up to me to care for his Pet and I did my best. Iason told me to keep Riki chained to his bed if he continued his violent behavior. 

“It’s for his own good,” my Master deemed. “I can’t have him destroying my Furniture or himself.”

This went on for weeks, months, and I suspect that both my Master and I were both at our wit’s end. I was called upon to participate in Riki’s training. I had never had to do this with Iason’s other Pets, but Riki was wild and not accustomed to the ways of Tanagura. The sight of him defying the most powerful Blondie in all of Amoï was something I will never forget. The sound of his cries as my Master disciplined him was also something I would never forget. Yes, Riki was horrible towards me, but I bore him no ill will. I didn’t hate him. How could I? I was less than two years younger than him, and I still remembered him from my days in Guardian. I never met or spoke to him in person at the orphanage—my dormitory and classrooms were in a separate wing—but I _did_ know him by sight and reputation. He was known by all who were in Guardian. We were all in awe of him, a boy who bowed down to nobody.

It didn’t take me long to make the connection between the Riki I had glimpsed in Guardian and the Riki who was Iason Mink’s current Pet, but when the realization dawned on me, I felt my heart break. This proud mongrel was now in chains…and I was called upon by my Master to fellate his Pet on a regular basis. The curses that Riki rained down upon me when I obediently performed the act was something I accepted. Why? Well, it was my duty to do as my Master ordered, it was my duty to care for my Master’s Pet, but beyond that I basked in the fury that was Riki the Dark. We were both lowly humans with no rights living at the mercy of the Elite, and so I felt a strange connection to him, even if the feeling wasn’t mutual. Riki was proud, and his pride was a reminder to me that even a castrated piece of Furniture such as myself could be worth _something_. Do not misunderstand. I admired Iason Mink. I respected him and was properly fearful of him, but Riki…Riki gave me hope, for what I know not, but he made me want to live, to care for him, to help him in any way possible. Was it foolishness on my part? Perhaps. But it gave real meaning to my life for the first time.

After six months or so, Riki began seeking me out for conversation and company. He was no longer violent towards me and so my Master allowed him freedom of movement within the confines of the penthouse. Still, the Pet was literally climbing the walls with frustration and boredom. Though he didn’t bare his teeth towards me like before, he was still a creature who despised captivity and he expressed his unhappiness freely through an appalling slew of curses and vile speech, especially if we were playing cards and he was losing. Mostly, though, he would stalk behind me as I went about my daily household chores, snarling under his breath or shouting insults about the “sick, perverted, slave-owning motherfuckers of whoop-dee-fucking-doo Eos Tower who should all jump off their fancy-schmancy balconies and die!”  

“Blondies are immortal,” I would tell Riki while I polished the silverware. “Even if one were to jump off a balcony, Jupiter could easily replace any damaged parts.”

“Then fuck Jupiter, too! Fuck ‘em all!”

Despite all the blasphemous things Riki would say, I could understand his anger. He had grown up free and answering to no one but himself. Here he had no say, no control, and he hated it. “Have you forgotten the filth of the slums?” I would remind Riki now and then, hoping to make him see that not all was bad in Eos Tower. “Don’t you remember going to bed hungry every night? At least here you have—”

“One more word, Daryl,” Riki would always interrupt, “and I will rip your fucking head off!”

Though Riki’s Pet debut had come and gone months ago, Iason continued to train Riki on his own. He no longer required my assistance and in many ways I was grateful. Riki was strong, lean and muscular, not soft and weak like the Academy-bred Pets, and if it were not for the fact that Lord Mink kept Riki shackled and held tightly in his arms during the early training sessions, I should think Riki would have bloodied me more than a few times. Fellating a raging Pet was a scary thing and something I had never experienced before. Still, the sounds Riki made the first time my Master…and his sorry condition afterwards…these were things I never spoke about to anyone, certainly not to any other Furniture. I knew better than to reveal what must remain private between a Master and his Pet, even though what a Master did with a Pet was normally for public display. That Lord Mink was engaging in something taboo…well, who was I to question it? My Master stood only below Jupiter, and so my allegiance was to him and not to any of the other Elite in Tanagura. If he deemed it necessary to engage in physical intimacy with his Pet, then so be it.

Except, I couldn’t help but see Riki’s predicament, both in and out of the bedroom. He was going insane from being caged up day after day with just the Furniture to entertain him. Master Iason did not send Riki to any Pet soirees and he did not seem to recognize the need that Riki had for freedom. As Furniture, we undergo rigorous training to subsume our personal needs and feelings—the very reason we are castrated upon reaching puberty—but, at sixteen, Riki was an intact adult male and half-feral at that. So, yes, I thought I was being helpful when I told Riki about the Pet rings one day. We were playing cards and betting with pieces of candy, candy which Riki was eating as fast as he won them.

“I swear, Daryl, I’m going to lose my mind if I stay cooped up here any longer. I’ll slit my own throat if I have to.” 

I gasped in horror. “No, Master Riki,” I begged, “you mustn’t do that. Lord Mink would be—” 

“Fuck your precious Lord Mink,” Riki grumbled, “and quit calling me ‘Master’ Riki. It’s just Riki, goddamn it. I told you already, I’m going to punch you in your stupid little face if you keep saying that!”

“Yes, sir…Riki.” I bit my lip, thinking. “Perhaps you should ask Master Iason for a Pet ring.” His black eyes lit up with curiosity, so I explained, “Pets who gain the trust of their Master are given a Pet ring: an earring or a necklace or a bracelet. Something pretty to wear to show that they are held in esteem.”

Riki snorted and rolled his eyes. “Fuck that shit. I don’t want any piece of dumbass jewelry.”

“Ah,” I smiled, “but having a Pet ring also means you are allowed to leave the apartment and go about Eos Tower on your own, within reason of course. You can go to the Pet salon, you can go to the arboretum, you can go shopping, you can—”

“Wait a minute!” Riki slammed his fist on the table in excitement. “If that perv gives me a Pet ring, then I can get the hell out of this place?”

“The penthouse, yes, you can leave the penthouse and move about certain areas of Eos Tower,” I reiterated, “but you cannot leave—” It was no use explaining the rules because Riki leapt up from the table, grabbed the rest of the candy, and headed off to his own room, hollering, “I’m gonna get me a motherfucking Pet ring! Woo-hoo!” I put the cards away and straightened up the chairs, then I went into the kitchen to prepare dinner. My Master had told me he would be taking his evening meal at home and that Lord Am and his Pet would be joining him. I decided to make a custard for dessert. Iason never asked for dessert if he was eating alone, but I knew that Lord Am had a sweet tooth and so did Riki. If Lord Am was bringing his Pet, then that meant Riki would have company, too, and he normally hated everyone…a sweet dessert might put him in a better mood. Ah…if only trouble could be averted by something as simple as dessert.

 


	16. Chapter 16

I couldn’t believe it was the Furniture who told me about the Pet rings. That jerk-off android would have kept me locked up in his penthouse until I croaked from old age probably, but I wasn’t going to let him get away with it, nuh uh, not now, not when I knew better thanks to Daryl spilling the beans. Shit, Iason was always lording it over me, acting all high and mighty, calling me his Pet and telling me what to do—sit here, spread your legs, touch yourself—but two could play this game. If Pets got rings and I was his stupid Pet, then where was my freaking ring? He better hand one over, goddamn it, if he wanted to keep calling me his Pet.

I took extra care in the shower, made sure I got myself nice and clean, and brushed my teeth without Daryl nagging me. Then I put on a thin, sheer black crop top that showed off my nipples and my abs, and a pair of skimpy black leather thongs. I looked like a total slut. Daryl caught me admiring myself in the full-length mirror in my bedroom but I was long past feeling any kind of shame in front of the Furniture.

“That perv is gonna bust a nut so hard over me,” I snickered to him as I posed with my crotch thrust out. Every bump and curve of my junk was clearly visible in that tiny thong.  I reached down and rubbed the palm of my hand over myself and grinned even wider as my cock plumped. What used to be obscene was now just plain normal. “He’s gonna cream his pants.” 

“Master Iason will be pleased,” was Daryl’s more diplomatic assessment. He held out a studded collar and asked, “Shall I put this on for you?”

Right. Iason was inviting his freaky friend Raoul Am over for dinner and that meant I would have to wear a collar as a sign of my submission. “I’ll do it myself,” I grumbled and grabbed the collar out of Daryl’s hand and snapped it on around my neck. I knew I should be grateful that Iason didn’t make me wear it all the time, like other Pets did. That’s what Daryl told me and he didn’t seem like the lying sort. If Iason had a guest or visitor to the penthouse, though, then he insisted that I look respectable. Heh, me looking respectable…what a joke. What was so respectable about parading around dressed like a whore? But _that_ was a good thing here in Eos Tower, the home of weirdo Blondies.

Daryl fussed with my hair, applying some nice smelling styling gel and I let him because it was easier than arguing with him. Besides, I wanted to look hot for Iason; I was going to ask for that Pet ring after dinner and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to make a good impression. “Lord Am will be bringing his Pet tonight,” Daryl told me as he arranged my bangs.

“Great. I’ll try not to punch the retard in the face.” 

Daryl’s eyes widened in shock and he pulled his hands away defensively. “M-m…Riki, you wouldn’t hit a girl, would you?” 

“A girl?” Now _I_ was surprised. “That Blondie’s got a female Pet?” I had assumed this Raoul Am would have a male Pet, just like Iason since those two seemed joined at the hip and head and who knows where else. It was Raoul who was walking with Iason that night in Midas when Iason caught me pickpocketing, it was Raoul who grabbed my ear and declared I was a mongrel with no citizenship, and it was Raoul who always looked at me with disapproval—no, it was more than that; it was _contempt_ —whenever he was over for a drink or a meal. The way Raoul looked at Iason was a totally different thing. You’d think the Blondie was in love with Iason, even though Daryl says that Blondies have no capacity for such a base emotion, but Iason could be weirdly sensitive when he wasn’t acting like a robot, so I figured Raoul was the same. He’d never brought his Pet along with him before, at least not since I've been here, and that made me curious. A _female_ Pet, eh? I’d never talked to a girl my entire life.

“Why, yes,” Daryl said, “one that Lord Am bred himself. They say she is the finest one to be produced by the Academy thus far.”

“Well, in that case…” I looked back into the mirror and flexed my muscles, curled up both arms and decided that my biceps had lost some of their former oomph. There was nothing to do in the penthouse except eat, sleep, and have sex with my…with Iason. It was world’s apart from my life in Ceres, where running and fighting for my life kept me firm. I flexed my biceps again, disgusted by my own vanity. “Do you think I look…soft?”

“Soft?” asked Daryl.

“My muscles,” I answered back, “do they look hard or soft?”  Daryl was wearing his usual Furniture outfit—a sleeveless tunic with loose trousers—and his arms were like toothpicks hanging at his sides. Maybe Daryl wasn’t the best judge of muscles. Then again, he served Iason and Iason was _ripped_ , so yeah, Daryl had definitely seen his fill of muscles. “Well?” I prodded when he just stood there biting his lower lip, brows scrunched together.

“Um…” Daryl hesitated, “a Pet is _supposed_ to be soft.”

“Oh, fuck me!” I pounded my fist into the palm of my other hand. “You’d think all that sex…that’s it. Tomorrow I’m doing a hundred push-ups and a hundred sit-ups twice a day.”

“That’s not what I meant!” he protested. “You didn’t let me finish.” I twirled a finger in the air and he continued explaining, “You’re not like a typical Pet. You’re not soft and weak, like a Pet _should_ be…” His voice trailed off because we both realized that he was telling me I didn’t meet the minimum standards of a run-of-the-mill Pet in Eos Tower. His pale face grew even paler, his childish features crumpling as I walked up to him and put my hand on his bony shoulder.

“Daryl,” I told him as he flinched under my touch, “I know I suck as a Pet. Thanks for the compliment.” 

***

We had some kind of stew that night, made with real meat of course, something that supposedly paired with the wine Iason and Raoul were drinking out in the dining room. I ate in the kitchen with Daryl, as usual, only things were kind of awkward because Raoul’s Pet was eating in the kitchen with us. I almost died when I saw that she wore an outfit as outrageously slutty as mine. I also noticed that she wore a pair of earrings set with emeralds in a starburst pattern, probably to match the green of her large round eyes. I wondered if those earrings served as her Pet ring. If that was the case, then Raoul didn’t spare any expense on her. Emeralds were extraordinarily rare and could only be purchased from another owner for an exorbitant price since the mining of that gemstone had collapsed eons ago. What was currently in existence was all there was to be had. That Raoul…talk about overkill, but it made me feel more than a little pissed off at Iason. That bastard hadn’t even given me a Pet ring made out of a fucking tin can, and he was even more loaded than Raoul! I knew this because Daryl had told me that Iason was the richest Blondie in all of Tanagura. That cheapskate!

Raoul’s Pet, though, was definitely high-end. Even I could see that. Her skin was flawless, almost translucent, it was so smooth and fair. My own dark ruddy complexion looked like mud next to hers. She had perfect little teeth and a bow-shaped mouth with plump lips. I couldn’t help but wonder what they would feel like to kiss. Would they be like soft pillows? Iason’s lips were thin and always cool. Guy’s lips were always warm and slightly chapped. My own? I’d never thought much about myself, how I must feel to someone else. I’d taken it for granted that Guy wanted me, liked to have sex with me as much as I liked it with him. And Iason, well, he was just bizarre; I couldn’t figure him out if I tried. And this female Pet who was so small and perfect…what must she think about a dirty slumdog like me? A whole lot, apparently.

Even though she had been silent the entire time she had sat on the floor next to Raoul in the living room, while I had to do the same for Iason—I even sat on my ass with my legs spread so Iason could feel proud of me, it was so fucking gross—as soon as she was sent into the kitchen with me and Daryl she wouldn’t stop talking. 

“Hi, my name is Mimea,” is the first thing she blurted out once the door to the kitchen swung shut. “I like what you’re wearing. We could be twins!”

She had the sing-song voice of a very young girl, or what I imagine would be a young girl. At Guardian, the girls were kept in a separate wing for the most part, but you could see and hear them at mealtimes when they ate in the private room next to the cafeteria. Then, if you listened above the noise of the boys in the main room, you might hear them chattering like birds. It always sounded like they were singing, their voices were so thin and high. This Mimea had a voice like that, and she kept warbling and chirping about how lucky I am to live in the penthouse of Lord Mink and maybe I could show her my room later on because her own Master Lord Am had promised her that no other Pet in Eos Tower had a nicer room than hers but she wanted to see for herself because _everyone_ knew that Lord Mink was of higher rank than Lord Am and didn’t that mean that Lord Mink’s Pet would also have a nicer room than she did? Plus, all the other Pets were _dying_ to know how an inbred mongrel was managing to live with Tanagura’s top Blondie: was he even housebroken? Did he know how to use a knife and fork? Riki had made such a terrible impression in public months ago and the gossip was rampant about how uncivilized he was. “He probably defecates on the floor!” someone had said at the salon and then everyone else had fallen to giggles.

This was revealed by Mimea within the five minutes it took for Daryl to serve us our food at the kitchen counter. Then Mimea took a breath and told me, still all friendly-like, “I saw you at your Pet debut.”

Well, that was news to me. “I don’t remember seeing you,” I said in return, and it was the truth. I didn’t recognize anyone besides Iason and Raoul at that perverted circus and I was too busy being the target of dirty looks and insults before I got into that fight with what’s-his-face. I had nothing in common with those Pets and I didn’t think I’d ever have to rub shoulders with them again anyway. In Ceres, every face is memorized because you never knew if they’d be your friend or foe down the road, but I’d barely looked at these whining creatures; I didn’t want them as friends and they weren’t even worthy of being enemies. Mimea’s beaming face turned dark at my comment, though, and Daryl, who was standing behind her at another counter plating up the next course to bring to the dining room was rolling his eyes at me like I had put my foot in my mouth and swallowed it whole.

“The other Pets said you looked like something that crawled out of the sewer,” Mimea declared in a hurt tone, “but I said you looked…special.”

“Special?” I snorted, laughing. “Yeah, I’m special alright. Hey, Daryl, why don’t you tell Mimea here how I get all sorts of special treatment from my horny ass _Master_?” Mimea literally gasped an inward shriek as Daryl shot me a furious scowl, which made me decide not to describe all the dirty things I did with Iason because Daryl never showed any extreme emotions, not even during those times when I was beating the crap out of him. “Sheesh, just kidding,” I backpedaled. “Can’t girls take a joke?”

“Was…?” Mimea fanned herself with her delicate hands, flapping them like wings at her blushing face. “I’ve never heard a joke like that. We don’t use that kind of language in the salon.”

“Really?” I stared at her perky tits barely hidden behind a strappy top and the bandage-sized thong she was wearing to cover a pussy I’d never seen in real life, only in porn videos. “You’d think ‘horny’ and ‘ass’ would be part of your Pet vocabulary.”

“We don’t use those words when speaking of our Masters!” she stated, her cheeks turning a deeper shade of red.

Daryl was practically hyperventilating over this conversation and took refuge by bringing more dishes to the dining room. As he opened the kitchen door, Mimea and I shut our mouths; we could hear Iason and Raoul talking about who was breeding which Pets and the fees that should be charged. When the door swung closed, our eyes met and for some reason, we both burst out laughing. I don’t know why. There was nothing funny going on. Maybe it was just a break in the tension between us or something, but there it was. We ate our stew in silence, grinning like idiots, but when Daryl came back into the kitchen carrying some empty plates and wearing the same mortified expression, Mimea and I were back to roaring with laughter. 

“I like you, Riki,” Mimea said.

She caught me staring at her tits again and, instead of hiding them, she sat up straighter so I could get a better look at them. I really wanted to put my hands on them, squeeze them, play with them. Being so near to a girl was wild and she was really cute, even if she was annoying and talked too much. I wasn’t sure if she was flirting with me or what, I mean, I had no experience with this kind of stuff. In Ceres, guys hooked up with other guys without ceremony. We might ask, “Wanna fuck?” or maybe skip the asking part altogether and just move on to the banging with no words exchanged. We sure as hell didn’t say shit like, “I like you” unless the intention was to become pairing partners. Holy crap, this boy-girl business was confusing, so I played it cool and grunted with a shrug, “Whatever.” 

To me, that sounded non-committal. I was flattered that she said something as silly as, “I like you, Riki,” but I wasn’t stupid enough to think anything would come of it. As Iason was so fond of drilling into my head while he was drilling my ass, I was his Pet and he didn’t seem like the sharing type. Still, it wasn’t so bad meeting another soul I could talk to, even if she did most of the talking, and if I could talk Iason into giving me one of those Pet rings, then I might actually have one person who was willing to be my friend at this so-called Pet salon. I wouldn’t be stuck in the penthouse all day getting on Daryl’s nerves, so this would be a win-win all around. Yep. A win-win all around.

 


	17. Chapter 17

I would have to reward Daryl with a new outfit, perhaps an embroidered tunic with satin piping. The evening meal had gone so well, but even before that my Furniture had managed to have Riki presentable. No, Riki was _beautiful_ : his dark hair shiny and smelling divine, every fine cut and curve of his lean body accentuated in black leather, studded collar encircling his slender neck. Even Raoul was rendered speechless at first. My brother was eager to show off his Mimea next to Riki, as if to highlight the difference between a polished diamond and a lump of coal, but my Riki dazzled just as brightly sitting at my feet, his thighs spread like a good and proper Pet. The temptation to kiss him in front of Raoul and his latest triumph of genetic engineering was overwhelming, but I drank my wine instead and promised myself that I would slake my real thirst afterwards. 

That our two Pets were silently eyeing each other escaped neither my nor Raoul's attention. In fact, we were both curious as to how an Academy-bred Pet would fare against my mongrel in close quarters. I had bragged to Raoul earlier that Riki could easily surpass a Stella-class Pet in terms of pride, except that Riki had the fiery temperament to back it up whereas a Stella-class, though rare and much dearer in cost, would surely cower if threatened. The other Pets at Riki’s debut had behaved in typical tiresome Pet fashion: bold and arrogant when ganged together but utterly weak and helpless when confronted with Riki’s true ferocity. This Mimea, though, was looking at Riki with overt interest, her pupils dilated and skin flushed. Raoul’s annoyance over this was something I couldn’t let pass. I had to tease him about it over dinner.

“It appears that my non-pedigreed mongrel is irresistible even to the Academy’s finest Pet," I declared before taking another bite of stew. Raoul’s green irises sparking with irritation made everything taste _delicious_.

“A feral piece of trash like that is rife with base pheromones. It’s practically sewage pouring out of an open pipe. Yes, that’s all it is,” Raoul insisted, “a purely chemical reaction. Perhaps it is time we eradicated such a primitive response. I’m certain I can produce breeds that are influenced by tactile stimuli only.” 

I laughed heartily at that. “Then you better make sure they are blind, and perhaps deaf and dumb, too, although I’m not sure they can be any dumber than they are already.” 

“Iason!” Raoul raised his voice. It was clear he was genuinely disgusted with me.

“Now, now, brother,” I soothed. “I didn’t mean to offend. In no way am I questioning your genius abilities.”

“Pfff," huffed Raoul, pouting. “You are horrible sometimes.” 

“I know, Raoul, and that’s why you adore me so much.” 

When Daryl brought custard out for dessert, Raoul was so pleased it made him forgive my earlier assault on his own pride. What a child he could be with his love of sweets, just like Riki! I reached over and gave his gloved hand a squeeze, which he returned with a charming smile.

“You are a beauty,” I told Raoul. My brother truly was stunning in looks, but the one I wanted in my arms that night was eating his custard in the kitchen. I could hear Riki’s voice now and then, his snarky voice interrupting the twittering of Raoul’s Pet, and once again I had to fight the urge to get up from my seat at the table and go ravish him in the kitchen. The sight of Raoul enjoying his dessert, the silver spoon brought to his lips with grace, was a good distraction. I gave him a kiss on the cheek.

“What have I done to deserve such a treat?” asked Raoul. He passed the pink tip of his tongue briefly across his upper lip, savoring the sweetness of the custard.

Daryl came into the dining room carrying an open bottle of Sauterne. I signaled for him to fill our glasses with the dessert wine. “Well done, Daryl.” And then I turned back to Raoul and said, “You need do nothing but be my brother. My favorite brother.” I raised my glass to him, a pleasant flutter in my chest. “Just that, and I am happy.” 

***

Of course, my elation that night was only partly due to the pleasant meal with Raoul. In the six months I’d had Riki as my Pet, I’d received nothing but criticism from my fellow Blondies, Raoul included, although Raoul was alone in standing by my side, too. I knew full well that his goal, even in expressing his disagreement with my actions so steadfastly, was to protect me from the censure of my peers and of Jupiter especially. On the surface of my consciousness, it made sense to follow the status quo, but underneath…I found myself walking a different path, a path that was new and unfamiliar. I was doing things that were strangely out of my control, irrational even. How could this be? Was this a natural step in my evolution or had something gone terribly wrong with my programming? All I knew for certain was that Riki was the key to this change in me. And I liked it.

Riki was changing, too, and I liked that even more. After Raoul left for the night with Mimea in tow, I found Riki waiting for me in his bed, naked and willing. This was new. Normally, he would put up a fight, call me offensive names as a prelude to our coupling.

“What? No foreplay?” I teased. A scowl leapt across his face instantly, telling me that Riki the Dark was still very much alive and kicking. “Very well, then.” I slowly stripped off my clothes. His eyes were like obsidian in the low light of the room. They were on me, watching, and though we were not even touching, I could feel his soul cradled inside my chest, what could only be joy driving me to the edge of sanity. “Come, Riki. Serve your Master.” I stood by the bed and my beautiful Riki obeyed, on his hands and knees as he took my cock into his wet mouth. I made myself small enough for him to swallow whole without choking, small enough for me to put him on his back and penetrate him with just a shadow of pain. “You are my Pet, Riki.” I ran my thumbs across his nipples, pinched them, licked them, bit gently along his neck and shoulder, leaving behind a trail of red welts, proof of my ownership. “You are Iason Mink’s Pet and I am your Master.”

I let his moans and cries set the rhythm of my thrusts, I let that sweet music swell my cock until he was clawing at my back, shouting, “Unggh…fuck! So big! Fuck! Iason!” I had him come once, twice, three times before his pleading moved me to finish for the night. When I pulled out at last, the sheets were a mess. I called for Daryl to clean us up, and then I picked Riki up and carried him to my own room.

“You’ll sleep here with me,” I ordered. Another first. Imagine my happy surprise when he didn’t resist, merely rolled over and snuggled against me. What he said next shocked me. 

“I want a Pet ring,” he told me. “Daryl says all good Pets get a Pet ring. Iason?” His voice became quieter. “Wasn’t I a good Pet tonight?” 

It was impossible to suppress the laughter. “Oh ho?” I chuckled. “After all this time, you’re suddenly eager to bind us together?”

“Fuck you, asshole!” Riki snarled, hackles up. He punched my chest with his balled up fist, tickling me and making me laugh harder. “You jerk! When are you going to give me a goddamn Pet ring? You can’t keep me a prisoner here forever!”

“I can’t?” I grabbed his wrists and pinned him down easily while he continued to kick and buck and squirm beneath the weight of my body. “I can do anything I like, Riki. I am Iason Mink. I am your Master. Don’t ever forget that.” I stared down into his flashing eyes, his lips curled into an angry grimace. So lovely. “Still…” I loosened my grip and felt his body go slack again, and when he let me caress his cheek, I told him, “I’ll consider it.” Indeed, he had behaved himself well that night, he had made me proud of him in front of Raoul. “If you want a Pet ring, if you continue to prove yourself to me, then you shall have one.”

I didn’t know what it was exactly that Daryl had said to Riki, but apparently my Furniture had convinced Riki that he should accept my complete control over him. This was something I never expected Riki to comply with but my mongrel was unpredictable in so many ways. He was a mystery I had yet to solve, and I would understand him no matter the cost or consequence.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone out there has seen the “Unchained” version of Ai no Kusabi and knows what was spoken between Iason and Jupiter, please let me know the gist of the dialogue in the comments section. Thank you so much!


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it's been a while since I've been able to update, so here's a longer chapter.

Have you ever wished you could go back in time just so you could punch the shit out of your stupid teenage self? I still can’t believe all the retarded things I did out of anger, out of spite, out of sheer idiotic pride, but my sixteen-year-old self was hopeless. I thought I could play with fire and not get burned. Man, was I wrong. I was _such_ a dumbass.

I was so fucking proud of myself that night when I put out like a whore for Iason after dinner with Raoul’s Pet, Mimea. She was pretty and cute and she talked to me without making me feel like I was a piece of crap. Most of all, she was a _girl_. Holy hell! How many slumdogs could claim to have actually talked to a girl! And not only that, she smiled at me, laughed at my lame jokes and even wanted to see my room. There was nothing special about my room—it held just a big comfy bed and a table next to it—but she seemed to think that my room was better than any other Pet’s room in all of Eos Tower. Weird, but I’d take weird from a girl any day. The way she gushed over how ‘spacious’ it was and how the sheets were top of the line in ‘thread count’ made me wonder if these things actually meant something. It wasn’t the first time I felt like an ignorant rube. I mean, I was from the slums and nothing more than walking trash in Eos Tower. What did I know about ‘thread count’ and the square footage of bedrooms? We were lucky to have flea bitten blankets in Ceres. Even the little apartment that I rented when I worked as a courier for Katze—a luxury at the time—was a total shithole compared to Iason’s penthouse. You’d think I’d realize that I was in a much better place now and that I would play it smart, but no.

“I’ll be getting a Pet ring soon,” I told her. I don’t know why I blurted that out; I hadn't even asked for one yet. Maybe I wanted to brag a little. She was being so nice to me, batting her long eyelashes and giggling at everything I said, ooh-ing and aah-ing about my kickass bedroom. If that impressed her, then who knows how she’d moon over me once I was wearing a Pet ring even fancier than her emerald earrings. Then she’d really think I was hot shit. “We could hang out at, uh, that Pet salon place.” I had no idea what this Pet salon was except she had mentioned it several times over dinner, that she was there practically every day, and Daryl had talked about it too. I imagined a mirrored, light-filled room with a bunch of Pets getting their hair and nails done. That wasn’t my thing—we didn’t even have salons in Ceres; Guy always trimmed my hair for me with his switchblade—but if it meant spending a little time with Mimea, then I’d be okay getting a freaking manicure. 

“Oh, yes!” she squealed, clutching my biceps in her soft little hands. “We can have so much fun together!”

Her eyes were so big and round and green—unlike Iason’s cold blue irises—her cheeks so pink and her lips so red. She smelled like flowers. There was a large greenhouse at Guardian where the Mothers and Sisters grew all sorts of plants. I had snuck in there with Guy one night and we had wandered up and down the aisles sniffing all the different blooms. Mimea smelled like this one particular flower. I think it was called a peony. Anyway, she was standing so close to me our bodies were touching and my head was just buzzing with a million things I wanted to do with her, but mostly I wanted to kiss her.

So that night when Iason came into my room, I was primed and pumped, so horny I stroked my cock without him even ordering me to play with myself. I spread my legs and wriggled my ass, rode his dick so long and hard I nutted three times before I ran out of juice. And when he said he’d ‘consider’ my request for a Pet ring, I knew I had him wrapped around my little finger. I had to hide my face in his armpit so he wouldn’t see me grinning. A week later, I got my wish. And, boy, did I regret it.

I was asleep when Iason came into my room and woke me up when he put his hands on me. I thought he wanted to fuck me, so I just laid there and let him rearrange my limbs. By now I knew it was useless to fight a Blondie, especially if that Blondie was Iason Mink and he was in the mood to play with my body. I didn’t pay too much attention to what he was doing. I had been drinking earlier that night and didn’t really care about anything except getting back to sleep and dreaming about Mimea’s tits. I figured if he wanted to stick his cock into me, then so be it. I would let him have his way and then maybe he’d leave me alone for the next day or two. He hadn’t touched me since that night when he’d had dinner with his friend Raoul, that same night I had met Mimea. By the time I was aware, awake enough to know what was going on, he had slipped a cold metal ring around the base of my cock.

“Here is your Pet ring, Riki,” he said, his voice low and soft. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

I bolted upright in bed and looked down at myself, looked down at my cock, still half-rigid with visions of Mimea’s firm breasts jiggling around in my brain, and sucked in a horrified breath. “Wh-what is this?” I fingered it, felt the firmness of the metal, went to pull it off and then gasped when it tightened uncomfortably. I went limp in two seconds, terror flooding through me like ice water as I tried to pull the ring off of my dick. It only tightened further! “Get it off me! Fuck! Get it off me!”

“Calm down, Riki,” Iason ordered. “You’ll only hurt yourself.” He gripped my wrist and whispered into my ear, “ _I_ am the only one who can remove the ring now. If you try to take it off, you will only damage yourself.” He lifted my chin between his gloved thumb and forefinger so I was forced to look into his steely blue eyes. “This D-type Pet ring is the only kind suitable for a mongrel from Ceres.”

“You motherfucker!” I shouted. “What are you doing to me?” 

“Only what you wanted, Riki. Remember? You are the one who asked for it.” 

“I…this…this isn’t what I asked for!” I pulled desperately on the ring again. It wouldn’t budge.

And then Iason slapped me. He slapped me hard across the face. It stung like hell. I wasn’t expecting it. It had been a while since he had punished me and I hadn’t even done anything wrong. Okay, I had just called him ‘motherfucker’ but that wasn’t exactly new. The slap, though…it made me hate him all over again! It brought up all my despair and made me realize I had been fooling myself for some time now. I had let myself accept his touch, his…kisses. I had let myself believe it felt good, so good. And now we were back to square one. Iason was the same smug, domineering asshole who had caught me pickpocketing and I was being put in my place like I was _nothing_!

“Get it off me!” I screamed. I tugged even harder to no avail.

He hit me again, so hard I was seeing stars in front of my face. It took a moment for my vision to clear, but then I saw him lift his hand and twist a ring on his finger and a jolt of unimaginable pain shot through me from the base of my cock, up my spine and through the top of my skull as if someone had impaled me on a red hot spike. I cried out in agony. 

“Do you feel that, Riki?” Iason asked. “Do you know what that is?” 

I was writhing on the bed, twisting and turning and clutching my cock, squeezing it between both of my fists, the breath knocked out of me. “Stop it! Make it stop!”

“That is me, your _Master_ , holding you in the palm of my hand,” Iason told me. “Are you ready to be a good Pet now, _Riki_?”

All I could do was pant in pain, curled into a tight ball. “Please…Iason…please…” And then the pain was gone, and in its place was the most soothing warmth, a steady pulse of pleasure that rose in intensity until I was gasping once more, except this time it felt too good to be real. “Iason…Iason…”

“What, Riki?”

I felt Iason’s body next to me, big and firm, and I reached out and clutched his robe. The ring at the base of my cock was vibrating and sending the most intense waves of aching sensation from my balls to my fingertips and toes. “Do me. Fuck me.” I spread my legs, pulling them up to my chest and offering myself to him. I had no control over myself. All I knew was that I wanted him, I wanted him deep inside me, filling me up. “Make me cum. Iason. Make me cum!”

He didn’t use his fingers on me; I couldn't wait for that. I got on my knees, ass in the air, my own hands spreading my cheeks apart for him, and when he shoved his cock into me it hurt so good I screamed at the top of my lungs.

“Do me like the first time!” I begged. I gripped my cock, the pulsing of the ring running up my thumb and into my entire arm as I stroked myself. I felt Iason’s dick swell inside me, so big I thought I would burst. I was out of my mind in pain and in pleasure. “Don’t stop. I…I…”

I didn’t know what I was saying. I love you? I hate you? Which one was it? And why did it feel so good and bad at the same time? 

*** 

The next evening, Iason told me that I could go to the Pet salon. 

“Pet salon?” I asked, feigning ignorance. “I don’t need a haircut.”

He laughed into his glass of wine. I was sitting in his lap—he had ordered me to, as usual—my ass still sore as all heck, and he was fondling my dick and kissing my neck while the ring around my cock pulsed gently.

“You have a Pet ring now. You can go to the Pet salon to socialize. Daryl can bring you there.”

I huffed out an angry breath, playing coy. The truth was, I had every intention of meeting Mimea there. Iason, though, didn’t need to know that. He was a controlling bastard and I didn’t want him to interfere with my life any more than he had done already. 

“What if I don’t want to go?” I asked, acting all disinterested. “Those Pets at my stupid ‘debut’ all hated on me. Why would I want to hang out with the likes of those shitheads?” 

“Now, now, Riki. They’ve never seen anything like you. Maybe you could teach them a thing or two, eh, Riki? Maybe you could show them what a mongrel is made of.” 

 _Yeah_ , I thought. _I’ll show them_.

When the time came, though, I found out that I had to wear my freaking collar and be led on a leash by Daryl. Fuck! Talk about humiliating!

“Why don’t you or Iason ever tell me what’s really what?” I complained as Daryl walked me off the elevator. Then I dragged him along behind me as I stomped through the mezzanine. The signage told me that the Pet salon was to my right. “Get your ass moving!” I was anxious to know if Mimea would really be there or if she was just stringing me along. All around me people were giving me dirty looks. “What’s the matter?” I sneered and then grabbed my crotch. “You want some of this?”

“Riki, please behave,” Daryl pleaded beside me. He tugged on the leash to get my attention. “If you don’t behave, I’ll have to take you back to the penthouse straight away.” 

I wanted to punch him in the face, but he looked genuinely worried. “Fine. Whatever. Should I kiss your ass while I’m at it?”

“Just follow along quietly,” Daryl said in a whisper, “and stop drawing attention to yourself.”

“How am I supposed to not draw attention to myself?” I asked. “I mean, _look_ at me.” Daryl had dressed me in a sheer outfit: a black mesh top with a matching pair of shorts, my nipples and junk visible behind the flimsy fabric. Even the ring around my cock was visible. “I’d be less naked if I weren’t wearing anything!”

“You don’t understand, Riki,” Daryl explained. “A Pet must always don proper attire, especially in public, and that attire must always accentuate a Pet’s assets.”

“Assets,” I snorted. “Yeah. Right.” I fondled myself and got a nice chub going. “How’s that? Am I accentuating my assets properly?” I had meant to get a rise out of Daryl but then I noticed people nodding with approval at my obscene display and I stopped stroking myself through my shorts. “What the hell? Is _everyone_ here a pervert? It’s not just Iason?”

Daryl merely sighed and stopped in front of a neon lit doorway. “Thank Jupiter, we’re here.” He waved his hand with a flourish. “This is the Pet salon,” he announced as he unclipped the leash from my collar. “You go inside and make friends with the other Pets. I’ll wait for you here in the front room with the other Furniture. Go on now, Riki. And remember: no hitting or kicking or biting.” 

I rolled my eyes at him and ambled through the door towards the sound of music and chatter. My Pet ‘debut’ had been a joke and my expectations for this Pet salon weren’t exactly high, but as long as Mimea was there, I figured it would be worth a shot. Daryl had told me that I was allowed to socialize with any of the other Pets in the salon and that I could order food and drinks from the open bar, too. We didn’t have this kind of free shit in Ceres, that was for sure. I made my way down the hallway and into a large open room in the back. The salon turned out to be a club, a very fancy schmancy club with posh furniture and low mood lighting and music piped through hidden speakers. There was a fully stocked bar with six Furniture serving drinks and more Furniture tending to the Pets who wanted food. And Daryl hadn’t been wrong to dress me in such a revealing outfit because all the other Pets were just as or even more scantily clad. I sauntered over to the bar and ordered a drink, sipped it slowly while I scanned the room.

“What a bunch of brats,” I mumbled under my breath. They were all young boys and girls, barely pubescent. I felt like an old man at sixteen. Then one of them—a blue-haired, grey-eyed Pet wearing a diamond-studded collar and three gold bracelets—came up to me. He was staring at my neck and my chest, looking first with curiosity, and then in shock. Then he scampered off to a group of his pals and they began talking among themselves, then shooting me more looks, then they fanned out across the room like a horde of mice. “Weirdos.” It was then that I saw Mimea, who was sitting all the way in a back corner on a large sofa with some other Pets. The blue-haired boy who had approached me at the bar was whispering something into her ear. She turned her head, searching the room until her eyes met mine. I waved at her and, after a pause of recognition, she waved back and headed towards me.

“You made it!” she smiled, scooting onto the stool next to me at the bar. “I was wondering if you’d show up.” 

“Yeah, I’m here,” I smiled back, more than a little relieved. “Are they all so bizarre?” 

“Who?” 

“Them.” I waved my hand at the entire room. “What’s with them? They’re all acting like I have three heads or something.”

“Three heads?” 

“Yeah, like there’s something wrong with me.” 

“Oh…well…” She sipped on her acid green colored cocktail, glancing furtively at my neck, and said, “It’s the love bites…”

“Huh?” I touched my neck and then I grimaced. “That…what of it? You’ve got them, too.” I slugged down my drink and ordered another.

“Yes, but, you haven’t been to any of the Pet soirees.” 

“Soirees?”

“The sex parties. You haven’t been to any.”

Sheesh. Sex parties? “So what? I get plenty of sex as it is. I don’t need to go to any soirees for that.”

Mimea’s perky little mouth fell open, her eyes widened into saucers. “You mean…those love bites are from…your Master?”

“Yeah, who else?” That really left her speechless. “What? Doesn’t your Master Raoul fuck you?”

“I…I…”

And that’s when she fainted. Yep. She literally blacked out, her little body crumpling as I caught her in my arms before she hit the floor. I picked her up—she was light as a feather—and carried her over to one of the sofas and laid her down. All around me a murmur arose. At first, I was too worried about Mimea to pay attention to what was being said, but then I began to hear people saying shit like, “What did he do to her?” and “Can’t trust a mongrel” and “Did he infect her with his slum germs?” They were obviously blaming me for whatever had happened to her and, I don’t know, maybe they were right. Maybe what I said had upset her so much that she passed out. Maybe girls were real delicate that way and me asking her if Raoul fucked her was too rude for her female ears. She was breathing just fine so I decided to cut my losses and head out before they started calling for my head. Not that I was worried about getting beaten up—I could easily defend myself with one arm tied behind my back with this sorry bunch of losers—but this whole encounter was bumming me out. I stalked out of there to the sound of hisses, I kid you not, and found Daryl waiting for me in the front room just as he said he would.

“Are you ready to leave so soon?” he asked.

I let him clip the leash back onto my collar and trudged back out to the mezzanine with him following beside me. “I hate this place,” I muttered.

“Did something happen in there?” Daryl prodded with concern. “Did you get into a fight?”

“No. Just take me back to the penthouse.”

What the hell was wrong with everyone here? Nothing made sense to me. I didn’t ask to be here, but here I was. My life was so fucked up. Every time I thought I’d figured it out, it took a nosedive into some other trash heap. When I was living in Ceres, escaping it seemed the solution. To get away from the slums was a mark of success, but now I was beginning to understand why the few who did manage to escape would always return completely broken. I didn’t want that to be me, but there was no freedom in Tanagura, and Eos Tower was its shiny prison. If I was going to be stuck here, then I needed to find something for myself, I needed to find my own way and do my own thing or else I was going to fucking die. Maybe I’d pinned too much hope on meeting Mimea and being friends with her. Maybe she wasn’t part of the solution. Or maybe I was feeling so down because I had blown my first—maybe my _only_ —chance with being close to another human being. As soon as we got back to the penthouse I raided Iason’s liquor cabinet, drank an entire bottle of sake in my bed. I missed Guy so bad. I hadn’t thought of him lately, but that afternoon I laid there drunk and maudlin, wishing for the shitty life I had had before. Pathetic.

 


	19. Chapter 19

I was at my work console in Eos Tower, finally back in Tanagura after six months of constant travel to various cities, both on Amoï and off-planet. The Black Market trade was booming and I was never in one place for long, be it overseeing quality control at a lab that processed synthetic drugs or at a conference table negotiating contracts for the shipment of organs and Pets. It was mentally exhausting even if my body felt none of the weariness. Normally, upon return to Eos Tower and _especially_ after such an extended period of time away, I would report to the room reserved for Blondies, rather than to my own work office, in order to download all the data that had accumulated in my brain. Jupiter expected her sons to clear their cache of information on a regular basis—every month or so was standard protocol—but I had been busy with travel and not overly concerned about my laxness. I knew she would be pleased with what I had accomplished in the interim, despite the lag in sharing data.

There were other reasons I was dragging my feet. The delay gave me opportunity to put even more space between me and Riki. I had given him his Pet ring before my duties took me away from him, and thus I had no worries of him escaping in my absence, but the curiosity, the increasingly overwhelming _need_ to be with my Pet and to explore greater and deeper connection with him was something that I knew I should hide from my Creator. But Jupiter would see everything, _know_ everything once my mind was ‘freed’ in the room. She would access everything that I had experienced since the previous data download, so hiding was not an option, and there was nothing ‘freeing’ about having all your secrets exposed. The only thing I could do was distance myself from those experiences, let them fade through time so that the feelings were dull rather than acute and I could overlay them with more recent things, things like reprimanding an employee who had violated procedure, or the long, boring hours sitting at a conference table staring at some pencil-pusher trying to squeeze one extra credit out of the deal. It wasn’t quite like wearing a mask—Jupiter wasn’t so easily fooled—but if I cluttered my mind with enough idiotic memories, busied myself with enough mundane tasks, and stayed away from Riki until the ache in my artificial heart ceased to throb so painfully, then perhaps she would overlook my transgressions.

So I was at my terminal in my work office in Eos Tower instead of playing with my Pet in the penthouse as I desired so much. If I had any hope of escaping another reprimand from Jupiter, then sacrifices had to be made on my part. I had already called Daryl too many times to make sure that Riki was behaving himself, and my Furniture had assured me that Riki was finally settling down. During the entire six months of my frequent absences, Riki had not complained to him even once about being a Pet or a prisoner. It set my mind at ease and made it bearable to not rush to the penthouse and have my way with him. I had done that once before and Jupiter had given me a slap on the wrist that time; it would be suicide to rub it in her face by doing it over and over, choosing to visit with my Pet before laying myself bare to my Maker, in a sense placing Riki on a higher pedestal than Jupiter. I needed to remain steadfast, I needed to stay away from him until I was able to sit in that chair and allow Jupiter to probe into my brain. Once she had satisfied her own curiosity, then and only then would I see my Riki and take him in my arms. 

Raoul, though, wasn’t making things easy for me. He stood at my side, his gloved hand on my shoulder as he watched my fingers fly over the keyboard. I didn’t mind that he was reading what I was writing, nor what he said to me by way of unsolicited commentary.

“You’re as unforgiving as always,” Raoul murmured as he read my scathing email.

I stopped typing momentarily. “Is that a rebuke?”

“No,” he replied. “I wouldn’t think of telling you how to do your job.”

“Good," I began typing again, "because that moron Kiira cost me a 50% loss of profit at A-C Troy last month.” Though I kept my eyes on the screen, I could literally feel Raoul cringing. Kiira was _his_ trainee whose neglect had resulted in a biohazard disaster at the lab, causing the manufacture of a highly valuable strain of weaponized bacteria to grind to a halt. “I’ll have Ringa over in Raashi take over production for now.”

“You might as well ask Ringa not to sleep,” grumbled Raoul. 

“There’s no sense in putting up with incompetent fools like Kiira,” I shot back. That extra dig elicited another irritated huff from Raoul, which he tried to hide behind a fake cough. This was getting to be amusing, so I poked my brother in the proverbial eye once more. “I’ll send Katze to make sure the transition goes smoothly.”

Now he groaned openly. “You and your disgraced Furniture! Must you drag your good name and the reputation of Eos through the mud by employing such a shady character?” 

“Why shouldn’t I use him?” I swiveled in my seat to look up at Raoul’s face. He was wearing a scowl. “If I find someone with talent, with abilities, then I will use him to the full extent no matter who or what he is. Do you object?”

“Tch,” came Raoul’s reply. 

“And what in Jupiter’s name do you think the Black Market is?”

He turned his face away, unable to offer any counterargument, and it made me smile. I pushed a button on my keyboard and, having sent my correspondence, stood up, grasped Raoul’s chin in my hand and kissed him rather roughly. A sound, startled and needy, escaped Raoul’s throat. I kissed him again, deeper this time, sweeping my tongue against his before I felt him search mine out and suck on it with eagerness. Good. This was good. I would need to report to Jupiter soon and I wanted to...cover myself. During one of my data uploads, I had come across an amusing piece of information gathered from a water planet called Earth. There were creatures on that planet which lived in the various oceans, creatures which would adorn their bodies with found objects: pebbles, seaweed, shells, even garbage that had been discarded by humans. This was a strategy employed to fool predators, a disguise to avoid detection. For some reason, that bit of information had stayed with me, perhaps because it was charming in its naïveté, and more likely because my enhanced organic brain didn’t ‘forget’ things. But, though it was silly, I thought I could be like that sea creature camouflaging my true self by building up layers and layers of lies like the accretion of pebbles and shells. If I built up enough layers, then perhaps I could distract Jupiter enough to buy time for myself.

So I kissed Raoul again and again, letting the sensations spark across the synapses in my brain. If I were being naughty, then let Jupiter see _that_. Yes, I was kissing my brother, my fellow Blondie, but at least we were of the same kind. Let her punish me for drawing close to her own creation. As long as I could protect Riki from her, then I could bear her disapproval.

“Iason.” 

Raoul’s breathy voice against my cheek snapped me back to alertness. “Hmm? What?”

“We shouldn’t…” He pushed me away and smoothed down the front of his robe.

I understood Raoul’s reticence. Jupiter was likely watching us. Raoul was her first Blondie creation and I was her last and we, as her favorites, garnered the most attention from her. We usually limited our shenanigans to our private apartments where we knew we were accorded some freedom from Jupiter’s prying eyes, but engaging in intimacy in a public zone like my work office was pushing our luck.

“Ah,” I said, “yes, you are so right.” 

It was charming the way Raoul discreetly brushed his fingers across his lips, as if he could erase the kiss, and maybe remember it, too, beneath the touch of his gloves. It was adorable.

“Why don’t we go to the clubroom and play some pool,” he suggested. “It’s been awhile and I’d like to discuss a few things with you.”

“Yes,” I smiled into his handsome face. “Why not?” Playing pool with Raoul would be a good distraction and keep me away from Riki that much longer. I clutched Raoul’s hand in my own, giving him an innocent peck on the cheek. “Let’s go then, brother. Let’s play some pool.” 

***

The game began just fine. I was winning, as usual, so when Raoul began speaking to me in a rather severe tone, I chalked it up to him being a sore loser. I was enjoying myself, sharing a bottle of wine with him as we played, and it took me a moment to actually listen to what he was saying, nothing more than the standard complaints that I had been hearing ever since I took Riki as a Pet, that people were gossiping. My fellow Elites could be thoroughly obnoxious. Oh well, that was nothing new. Raoul kept at it, prattling on about who said what. I kept silent, let him speak his mind as I sank shot after shot. The more dismissive I was of his concerns, the more agitated he became until he finally got to the point. 

“I’m planning on breeding Mimea soon,” he said at last. “I have a suitable candidate selected.”

“Good for you,” I replied as I calculated the angle of a bank shot I wanted to make.

He tapped his stick against the side of the table, his brows pulled together in a frown. “Did you know that rumors have been circulating about your mongrel…and my Mimea?”

That made me miss my shot by a mile. In fact, I erred so badly the cue ball richocheted off the lip of the table and smashed the light fixture hanging above, I had struck it with such violent force.

“Oh ho,” Raoul laughed joylessly, “so that’s what it takes to make you pay attention.”

I rested my stick on the table and straightened up, asked calmly, “What rumors?”

Raoul sipped his wine, backpedaling with a, “They’re just rumors,” before careening forward, blurting out, “but perhaps there is some truth to them.”

“What rumors?” I repeated with a sigh to hide my concern. This was so incredibly tiresome.

“I’ve been told that your mongrel was seen taking liberties with my Pet.”

“Liberties?” Now I was the one chuckling without mirth. “Go on. Do tell.” The idea that Riki would find a pampered, dim-witted purebred Pet like Mimea interesting enough to take ‘liberties’ with was beyond even my extensive imagination.

“Don’t laugh at me, Iason. Haven’t you any concern about your reputation? About my reputation?” 

“So we’re talking about our reputations now, are we?” I picked up my glass of wine and drank deeply. The game was over, shards of glass all over the table, my mood sour.

“Please, Iason. At least send your mongrel to a soiree. Let him satisfy his base sexual urges with another Pet, be it with another male or with a female, as long as he keeps his filthy paws off my Mimea. I can’t have a mongrel like him sniffing around her…contaminating her purity.”

I cast him a sideways glance. “Are you serious? Do you really think Riki would ever touch your precious Pet?” 

“Of course he would! A degenerate mongrel like that would copulate with anything!” Raoul declared.

 _Anything?_ I wondered. _Even with the top Blondie in Tanagura?_ I shook my head. This conversation was not even worth having, but the next words out of Raoul’s mouth made me choke practically. 

“I saw it myself,” Raoul stated glumly, “the marks on her body. When I questioned her, she confessed that it was Riki who had…” There was a pause as Raoul took in my shocked reaction and muttered under his breath, “So even you can come to your senses. Never mind that. Just, please, for the love of Jupiter, send him to the soirees, let him find some other amusement. If he couples with another male, then it will lay all the accusations to rest. I’m begging you, Iason, keep him away from Mimea.”

My mind raced to find an objective explanation. Perhaps Mimea had lied. Pets are stupid creatures, I reasoned to myself, slaves to their own abject desires and capable of the most licentious behavior. She could have lied to cover her own slutty actions and blamed it on my Riki. Riki was a target for blame from the very beginning after all. Why should anything be different now? I took a deep breath and told Raoul, “I most certainly will  _not_ be sending him to any soirees. If you wish, if it puts your mind at rest, I will keep him confined in his room.”

Raoul threw up his hands in frustration. “As if _that_ would solve anything.” He huffed out an angry breath, shoulders slumped. “Iason…don’t say I didn’t warn you.” 

***

It was in a thoroughly angry state that I sat in the chair and allowed Jupiter to access my most recent experiences and memories. What she would see front and center was my rather unpleasant conversation with Raoul, the strict taskmaster that I had been with Kiira, and all the wealth that I had brought to Tanagura during my six months of business dealings. Surely she could forgive me if I still yearned for my Pet. My brain was organic, I was capable of human feelings, and did she not want her creation to evolve? That was my trump card, the excuse I used every time she questioned me about my dealings with Riki. Of course I knew that it was prohibited for a Blondie to engage in sexual intercourse, especially with a human, but I was curious and curiosity was not necessarily a bad thing, was it? I sat in that chair, my mind probed by Jupiter, the data pouring out of me the way I had seen blood drained from living creatures in Raoul’s various labs, and gave myself up to her. There was no point in fighting her, no point in resisting. She held all the cards.

For some reason, I thought of Riki playing cards with Daryl, the two of them trying to out-bluff the other. Was that a human thing? What was that like, to be human? I existed on a different plane, well above such primordial slime, and yet I wanted to know ever since I had met Riki: what was it like to be human? What was it like to truly feel things? Humans were mortal, Blondies were immortal. Humans feared death because their lives were precarious, limited; Blondies feared nothing because their lives had no end, unless Jupiter chose to end it. What was it like, then, to love another knowing that it couldn’t last? I felt something cold and wet slide down my face and raised my gloved hand to touch it. Was it tears? Was I crying? I hadn't even known that I could.

“Jupiter,” I spoke into the darkened room, data swirling about my head as she absorbed my memories. “Will I die one day? Would you ever let me go?”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, I just realized this was a very long chapter. Hope you didn't mind my ramblings.


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